conquest, and also to work the mines. In Cuba the cultivation of sugar had become very profitable, and the stringent enforcement of the international treaties against the African slave trade had forced the planters to look elsewhere for laborers. Brazil and other countries were likewise seeking for an increase of the laboring class. China with its superabundant population afforded the best field from which these countries could obtain their much needed supply.
This led to the establishment of what is known as the coolie trade—the procurement from southern China of laborers, their transportation to Peru, Cuba, and other countries nominally under a contract of service for a term of years, but virtually constituting a system, of slavery with all its attendant hardships and horrors. The American consul at Hongkong, who was familiar with this traffic, reported to his government that it differed from the African slave trade "in little else than the employment of fraud instead of force to make its victims captive." Secretary Seward, who visited China on his tour of the world about the time when it was at its height, described it as "an abomination scarcely less execrable than the African slave-trade." The headquarters of this trade were established at the Portuguese port of Macao, as it was not permitted from the Chinese ports nor the British colony of Hongkong. For some twenty years it constituted the main business of Macao, where the iniquitous traffic was carried on long after it had been outlawed by the leading maritime nations of the world.
Many of the poorest classes of the Chinese, in the
