Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/56

50 and consequently enables him to hide many of the shams of his life." (The Macmillan Company, N. York and Lond. 1901). What I have quoted here from Thomas occurs in the chapter on "Characteristic Traits" of the American negro, one of the best, the truest and soundest descriptions of the character of the average American negro it has ever been my pleasure to peruse. I believe the negro blood preponderates in Booker T. Washington.

Now, the colonists in first introducing the negroes into this country were to some extent inspired by religious motives. The superannuated "soul-saving" proposition was at the bottom of it, but the cloak in the course of time soon became wofully threadbare, to be finally converted into a ghastly shroud in no way concealing the decomposed and emaciated black cadaver, that might fitly stand for the emblem of the disgusting traffic from its inauguration to its death. Slaves, however, at first prospered in the colonies, and seeing this not a few attempts were made to enslave the indigenous red-men, but it was an utter failure. They were in every way unfit for labor, perished under the ordeal like sheep, and finally the attempt was generally abandoned.

In 1562 the then Anglo-Saxons entered the field as slave traders and they succeeded in their undertakings from the very start. Royal Companies were formed, treaties were drawn and ratified, and British slave-trade soon became a powerful institution (1713). "In those days," says an authority at hand, "the ship-chandlers of Liverpool made special displays in their windows of such things as hand-cuffs, leg-shackles, iron collars, short and long chains, and furnaces and