Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/52

46 of the race, whether that representative was of pure African stock, a slave, a half or other fractional caste, or a freedman. I know the genus, and I know both the species and the subspecies, if for the nonce we may apply those zoological terms to the true types and the various intergrades of this race of beings.

Now, the existence of human slavery in one form or another in various parts of the world dates back to the very dawn of history. A list of all those who have been captured and forced into slavery in the career of mankind upon earth up to the present day would amount to many, many millions. An account of these untold millions of beings who have thus been enslaved, their histories, their lives, their deaths, and their fate afterwards would be one of the most awful descriptions imaginable. Filled to the brim and overflowing with the rankest injustice, the most wholesale and dastardly murders, tortures unspeakable, fiendish cruelties, slaughter, deception, unbridled lust, tyranny, and indeed, every crime both petty and capital that the mind can conceive of, or that the hand of man has ever committed when guided by the very lowest instincts of depravity and degradation. Millions of our own species have been dealt with in this manner, and make up such a death-roll. No part of human history can in any manner compare with it. Even the record of the endless murders and tortures committed in the name of Christ and Christianity pale when compared with it, and, as a matter of fact, the so-called Christian nations have in history been the chief ones who both supported, countenanced, and directly engaged in the African slave-trade.

England, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, and many