Page:Colonization and Christianity.djvu/435

 Do they know, that when these holy and victorious men have thus conquered all the difficulties they calculated upon, and seen, by God's blessing, the savage reclaimed, the idolater convinced, the wilderness turned into a garden, and arts, commerce, and refined life rising around them, a more terrible enemy has appeared in the shape of European, and chiefly English corruption? That out of that England—whence they had carried such beneficent gifts, such magnificent powers of good—have come pouring swarms of lawless vagabonds worse than the Spaniards, and worse than the Buccaneers of old, and have threatened all their works with destruction? Do they know that in South Africa, where Smidt, Vanderkemp, Philip, Read, Kay and others, have done such wonders, and raised the Hottentot, once pronounced the lowest of the human species, and the Caffre, not long since styled the most savage, into the most faithful Christians and most respectable men; and in those beautiful islands that Ellis and Williams have described in such paradisiacal colours, that roving crews of white men are carrying everywhere the most horrible demoralization, that every shape of European crime is by them exhibited to the astonished people—murder, debauchery, the most lawless violence in person and property; and that the liquid fire which, from many a gin-shop in our own great towns, burns out the industry, the providence, the moral sense, and the life of thousands of our own people, is there poured abroad by these monsters with the same fatal effect? Whoever does not know this, is ignorant of one of the most fearful and gigantic evils which beset the course of human improvement, and render abortive a vast amount of the