Page:A Chapter on Slavery.djvu/68

 In the following passage, which will conclude, for the present, our extracts from Park, there is a brief summary of the facts already stated in reference to the number and general condition of the slaves. He is speaking here particularly of the Mandingoes; but as shown from previous extracts, the same statements apply to Africa in general. The writer, after a description of the manners of the inhabitants, remarks:

"In the account which. I have thus given of the natives, the reader must bear in mind, that my observations apply chiefly to persons of free condition, who constitute, I suppose, not more than one-fourth part of the inhabitants at large; the other three-fourths are in a state of hopeless and hereditary slavery; and are employed in cultivating the land, in the care of cattle, and in servile offices of all kinds much in the same manner as the slaves in the West Indies. I was told, however, that the Mandingo master can neither deprive the slave of life, nor sell him to a stranger, without

wars, the trade had greatly declined, the negro King of Dahomey sent a special embassy, consisting of his brother and son, to Portugal, for the purpose of reviving the traffic, and of concluding a treaty with Portugal to that end. In truth, the touching pictures which hare been drawn by some of the English poets, of the white man landing at night, and kidnapping the poor African, — if not entire fictions, yet, at most, describe cases that most be mere exceptions. It is well known that without the active coöperation of the negroes themselves, the white trader could not procure a single cargo of slaves; and had not slavery and the slave-trade existed most extremely in Africa before, such an attempt on the part of the whites would probably never have been made or thought of. It should at the same time be remembered, that these facts afford no justification whatever to the unprincipled trader, who takes advantage of the low moral condition of the natives, to carry on the abominable trade in human beings: they are adduced simply to show the true cause of the existence of this lamentable state of things.