she soon perished, and was probably devoured by wild beasts."[1]
What a picture is this! It is scarcely surpassed by the sad tale of "Old Prue"[2] or even that of poor "Uncle Tom" himself. Yet such distressing circumstances are doubtless occurring throughout Africa daily and continually, and have been for a thousand years past. It' is not merely, as before shown, in connection with the Atlantic slave-trade, carried "on by the whites, that such things take place, but also in the Great Desert slave-trade carried on by the Moors; and independently of both of these — they occur among the negroes themselves in the heart of the continent. It is, in fact, the Africans themselves who are the cause of their own sufferings. It is a great error to suppose that this distressing state of things originated with the whites, however much it may have been aggravated by them. Had there been no internal slavery and slave-trade, there could have been no external. Had the Africans not been long addicted, previously, to buying and selling each other, within their own continent, they would never have been found Willing, or could have been made willing, to sell their fellows, as they do, to the white traders upon the coast. Here is the true secret and explanation of the cause of Africa's suffering from the slave-trade and slavery, — namely, Africa's own state of moral degradation.[3]
- ↑ Park's Travels in the Interior Of Africa, chap. xxv.
- ↑ See Uncle Tom's Cabin, chaps. xviii. xix.
- ↑ To show how distinctly the Africans themselves are the cause of their own enslavement, and of the existence and continuance of the slave-trade, may be mentioned the striking fact, that in 1796, when, in consequence of the French Revolution and the subsequent European
