Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/311

 dollars. This fact is notorious, and I beard it authenticated by official authority. It is equally notorious in the island itself that the agent of the queen mother of Spain was and is extensively engaged in the infamous traffic; and it is more than suspected that, directly or indirectly, his royal mistress is a large participator in the heavy gains her agent realizes from this trade in human flesh. Indeed, the traffic is little short of being a legalized one; the amount of dollars payable to the governor or to the government (for there is much difference between these two) being, if not fixed by law or order, at leas' as well understood as if it were so. All this is, of course, in direct and manifest violation of the engagements and treaties made by Spain with England; and it is an ascertained fact that fully one-half of the slaves in Cuba are there held in abject bondage in violation of these solemn treaties and engagements. Iudeed, were it otherwise, it were nearly impossible that the Spanish colonists of Cuba could find slaves to cultivate their fields. Every one who knows Cuba, and the brutal manner in which the great mass of the agricultural slaves are treated there, will laugh at the idea of the slave population of Cuba being self-supporting. They also know that it is much cheaper to import slaves than to breed them. The planter in Cuba found this to be the case, even when the vigilance of the British and French cruisers had made slaves so scarce in Cuba that the price of an able-bodied one was fully five hundred dollars. Of course, now that such vigilance had been, for a time, at least, relaxed, and the price of slaves had fallen to from two hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars, the greater economy of keeping up the breed by importation is too plain to be overlooked. Hence it is that the idea of a self-supporting system seems to be quite out of the Cuban's calculations, and that in the barracoons on his estates there are often to be found numerous bands of males and but a very few females, or oftimes none at all. It has been said, and it is generally credited by intelligent parties resident in Cuba, that the average duration of the life of a Cuban slave, after his arrival in the island, does not exceed seven or eight years. In short, that he is worked out in that time. His bodily frame cannot stand the excessive toil for a longer period; and, after that average period, his immortal spirit escapes from the tortured tenement of clay. Ye extenuators of slavery and of the slave-trade, ponder this ascertained fact. Is it not enough to make the flesh creep, and to unite all civilized mankind to put an end at least to the traffic in slaves? 'Nor is it only by treaties that Spain and Brazil are bound to cease their illegal traffic in human flesh. England has paid them large sums of money as the condition of their doing so; and these sums they have received and accepted, under the annexed and expressed condition. It has been unjustly said by some writers on the other side of the Atlantio — writers evidently in the pay of those who think it for their interest to prevent their country from sharing in the glory Great Britain has acquired and will acquire, by her efforts for suppressing and putting an end to the horrors of the slave-trade — that Great Britain has no right to interfere with Spain and Brazil as regards this trade in their own colonies; that slavery is a domestic institution, with which foreign nations have nothing whatever to do; and that, In