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—13— in the year 1434, would have been very unsuccessful in his wicked designs had it not been for the anxiety of our fathers to procure European commodities. They wanted the white man’s goods, and he in turn their children; and, worst of all, the chief articles exchanged for human beings were spirits, tobacco, swords, gun-powder, and guns. Innocent and well-conducted commerce in cotton goods and tools for the improvement of agriculture were kept away from them. They must be supplied with the white man’s rum to render them more stupid, that they might be kidnapped and stolen away with greater facility. They must have gun-powder and swords enough to make war on their brethren and get plenty captives to give the white man’s vessel a good cargo of souls. In 1771, one hundred and ninety-eight slave-ships left England for Africa, fitted for 50,000 slaves. Our friend William Wilberforce, in one of his statements, said “ [sic]that the value of British manufactures exported to Africa was only £500,000, and that England exported during that year as much gun-powder to Africa as to all the world put together. In 1835, twenty-eight years after the abolition of slavery in England and her colonies, the value of gun-powder exported to Africa for that year alone was £150,000. Its degrading influence spread all over the continent, scattering the seeds of demoralization and barbarism everywhere to such extent that, as the great traveler Lander informed us, the Bouchees sold their own children for beads, and that the effect of the slave-trade introduced petty wars into the country as a profession. Agriculture was neglected, and cannibalism took its place on account of famine. We are not astonished at this when we remember that an Israelite woman prepared her own son for breakfast from the same cause. The Mendis, who are supplied with spirits and implements of war by European merchants along the Sherbro country, for which both they and the Sierra Leone government are now suffering from dullness of trade and decrease of