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ships the most economically employed by carrying liberated slaves one way, to evangelize Africa, and benighted Africans the other way, to receive the "protection and friendship" of the slaveholders and traffickers of our own country. Since learning of this recent transaction, we begin to suspect that Dr. Adams's book is having a wider influence than we had heretofore supposed. We have only one or two doubts in our conception of this "interchange." If hereafter the difficulties of obtaining war prisoners in Africa, to supply the American market, should become great, would it be allowable to rob the American colored emigrants in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and other such places, of their children, and bring them over in the middle passage, to the "protection" of American slavery? And if Africa should ever become fully evangelized, ought the "interchange" still to go on? If not, what would the "languishing" South do to obtain "the requisite supply" of laborers?

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But this is not all. We cannot leave this subject without calling attention to slavery, and especially now to the slave trade, as a stupendous" barrier in the way of the salvation of Africa and of man. Had we space we would debate the question, how much slavery in this land has impeded its evangelization since the first cargo was landed in the American colonies. Who needs to be told that an institution which denies the very doctrines that brought this nation, as such, into existence; that gives the lie to the reality of human rights; that proclaims that all men are not of one blood, and so takes its stand against Holy Writ; slavery, that breaks up the family relations, and abrogates marital and parental rights; that aids in the prostitution of the pure and virtuous to the most vile purposes; that denies the printed page of the Word of God to four millions of our fellow-men, and shuts them away from the ordinary and their rightful means of human knowledge; slavery, the most high-handed and extensive system of fraud and robbery ever known in a world of sinners for six thousand years, wresting alike from the weak and the strong the hard earnings of honest hands, and by violence, and all the barricaded powers of law, wrenching

away the rights of millions to themselves; who needs to be told that such an institution is a mighty barrier in the way of the Gospel, wherever it is preached or heard, and that the more the supporters of such a "sum of all villanies" profess religion, to a wide extent, the more infidels they make? The kingdom of God can never come until this system of iniquity is dead. True religion cannot foster injustice, nor prosper under it, though it may sometimes exist despite of it. Bartholomew de las Casas, a Spaniard, Bishop of Chiassa, first brought African slavery into America. To save the Indians he much loved from their sufferings and toils in the Spanish mines, he prevailed on his monarch to substitute Africans in their place. This very inception of slavery in America was injustice, and injustice has been its life from that hour to this.

The missionaries in Africa testify that the greatest obstacle to the success of the Gospel in that country is the slave trade, and that the existence of slavery, as practiced in this country, conspires with the slave traffic there to hinder their work. Messrs. Bushnell and Walker say, that so much is America joined to the commerce in slaves, in the minds of the natives of Africa, that they look with suspicion and fear upon Americans, as necessarily slave traders. Commander Foote, in connection with comments on the highly beneficial effects of the squadrons of England, France, and the United States, on the African coast, in suppressing the slave trade, remarks: "Missions and the slave trade have an inverse ratio between them as to their progress. When the one dwindles, the other

grows."-p. 216.

Rev. Dr. Perkins, the justly distinguished Nestorian missionary, says, "I hold that American slavery is the greatest human obstacle to the spread and triumph of Christianity that exists at the present period. I hold that our beloved native country is in most imminent peril, from the fearful system of American slavery, of falling into deep national disgrace, of calling down upon itself the signal judgments of heaven, and thus of blighting for a long period the fairest and the highest hopes of a suffering world." And the recent long delayed

action of the Prudential Committee of the American Board, sanctioned by the Board itself, in dropping the Choctaw Missions for their continued adhesion to slavery, has no doubt been hastened or emphasized by the fact that the missionaries of that Board, all over the world, feel that any responsible connection with slavery, of the society sending them out, is a greater burden than they can bear, and a greater damage to the salvation of men than the cause of Christ ought one moment longer to suffer.

Further, the immense evils and desolation to Africa herself, aside from the warfare upon missions, resulting from the slave traffic, pronounce the utter condemnation of slavery ten thousand times. Senator Davis complains that the Act of Congress, making the slave trade "piracy," "has destroyed a lucrative trade for ivory, oil, and gold-dust, which our merchants had long conducted with the inhabitants of the coast, and transferred it to our commercial rivals, the British." Let Mr. Davis look to Africa, and with some love for his neighbor, as well as for himself, consider what the slave commerce has done for her trade and all other interests. Commander Foote says, that legitimate "trade (in Africa) becomes inconsistent with slavery, and hostile to it!" The gold, ivory, dye-stuffs, and pepper, were procured on the coast, and were from exhaustible sources. They were obtained in the roaming expeditions connected with slave-hunting. "The great vegetable productions of the country, constituting heavy cargoes, have but lately come into the course of commerce.' These "require more industry with the hands, and a settled life." "The squadrons were necessary to protect (legitimate) commerce against the piracy of the slaver afloat, and the ravages of the slaver on shore." "The cultivation of the ground renders human labor and life of higher value. This diminishes the number of victims for the slave trade, and the number of human sacrifices made in religious worship. The cultivation and civilization of the people ensue."-pp. 217, 89, 93. Will Mr. Davis be willing to suffer, for the present, a little diminution in the profits of trade with Africa, for these most valuable ends of humanity! Mr. Foote further says: "Wherever the slave trade or its

effects penetrated, there of course peace vanished, and prosperity became impossible. This evil affected not only the coast, but spread warfare to rob the country of its inhabitants, far into the interior regions."—p. 90. Mr. Barth quotes from the Journal of Mr. Richardson as follows:

"From all reports, there is an immense traffic of slaves that way exchanged against American goods, which are driving out of the markets all the merchandise of the North. Indeed, it now appears, that all this part of Africa is put under contribution to supply the South American market with slaves.”—Barth, vol. i, p. 517.

The Rev. T. J. Bowen, after spending six years in traveling in Africa, in speaking of the apprenticeship system of the French, whereby they carry away many of the negroes to their colonies, says: "Africans will not leave their country except by force;" and adds, that in the efforts to get laborers. from there, "from two to four are destroyed for every one who reaches a plantation in America. In one journey of sixty miles I counted no less than eighteen towns and villages which had been laid in ruins to supply the slave markets." He himself saw a battle made by a slave-catching army, where twelve hundred and nine were left dead on the field, and he thinks as many more were killed next day.

An American missionary, Mr. Bowman, in a recent narrative, says:

"I have counted the sites of eighteen desolated towns within a distance of sixty miles, between Badagry and Abeokuta—the legitimate result of the slave trade. The whole Yoruba country is full of depopulated towns, some of which were even larger than Abeokuta is at present. Of all the places visited by the Landers, only Ishukki, Izbobo, Ikishi, and a few villages remain. Ijenna was destroyed a few weeks after my arrival in the country. Other and still larger towns have lately fallen. At one of these, called Oke Oddan, the Dahomey army killed or captured twenty thousand people, on which occasion the King presented Domings, the slaver, with six hundred slaves. The whole number of people destroyed in this section of country within the last fifty years, cannot be less than five hundred thousand."

We should like to ask Dr. Stiles whether he thinks the Lord has been pleased with all this, or similar "outrageous cruelty in making slaves,” in order that He might "bring the heathen

to this country, sustain them in this country, and subject them to the Christian influence of this country."-p. 196. If not, why does he make any apology for it? Why ask us to give it respect, as one event in a "stupendous scheme of Providence," in a "grand missionary plan?" We would ask Mrs. Tracy, whether, in view of all these abominations, her "heart still swells with gratitude to the Great Father of all, for the institution of American slavery?"

Such then is the slave trade, as it has been and to a wide extent is now; such in all its horrors of hunting victims, and of the "Middle Passage" to the poor stolen ones, and of anarchy, and desolation, and fear to the bereaved ones left; such is the slave traffic to the work of missions and the civilization and Christianization of peeled, torn, bleeding Africa, and to the salvation of men among evangelized and unevangelized of all earth's inhabitants! And is all the bitter condemning past not enough? Shall the land of freedom [!] reopen the accursed commerce? Shall she multiply, and freight, and sail her ships away to doomed Africa for more and larger cargoes of human flesh and human souls? Shall America thus in disgust flout before Heaven the very principles which gave her standing among the nations of the earth? Shall she abolish her laws against this infernal trade, or scorn them to the death, and while barbarians, or half-civilized nations, vote the slave trade an "outrageous cruelty" and close all their commerce against it, shall America, prostitute-like, sweep out into it again, and fill up with slaves her present slave states full to the brim, and then her "New Mexico, and her future acquisitions yet to be made south of the Rio Grande?" Alas, is this America's destiny! Will she fall, and waste amid the wreck of empires, as she must, if this is to be her career of wickedness!

If the slave-trade is right and is to be reopened, then all the counter movements should be given up. Shall the slave trade, now swept from a thousand miles of the African coast through the agency of Liberia and Sierra Leone, be all restored? Where peace, the cultivation of the soil, and the beginning of

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