Page:The American Slave Trade (Spears).djvu/220

 must recall an act passed by the British Parliament in 1833, to take effect August 1, 1834. This act was, in one respect, the most notable in the history of human liberty, for while in a thousand other cases men have done noble deeds for their own liberty, in this one the British nation voluntarily taxed itself to the extent of £20,000,000 to provide liberty for an inferior race. During more than thirty years Great Britain spent regularly more than £500,000 a year on her African squadron and gave the lives of many of its best sailors for the benefit of the despised negro, and meantime, at one appropriation, added £20,000,000 to all that expense. As a national recognition of the obligation which the dominant race owes to all inferior races the work of Great Britain in connection with negro slavery and the slave-trade remains unequalled in the history of the world.

On August 1, 1834, slavery for life was forever abolished in the British nation. The legislation of all other nations of that day was based on the inhuman idea that mental and physical superiority in one race gave it the right to deprive inferior human beings of liberty and to extort from them labor for the aggrandizement of the superior race.

In the year 1830 the city of Alexandria, Va., was what may be called the Omaha of the human cattle trade. Slaves were gathered there by traders for transfer to the ever-craving maw of the Gulf States. In the course of the year the brig Comet was loaded there with slaves and cleared for New Orleans, but on the way she was wrecked on the False Keys of the Bahama group. Wreckers carried crew and slaves to Nassau, where the authorities held that the slaves were free,