cent. in a small ship sailing with little charge, and the voyage directly home from this coast not to exceed 7 or 8 months out and home, if well managed."
These observations of Barbot's are alike interesting and instructive, and in principle applicable to the trade to-day. Do not imagine that Barbot was an early member of the Aborigines' Protection Society when he holds forth on the way in which Europeans "in former ages" basely dealt with the angelic confidence of the Blacks. One of his great charms is the different opinions on general principles, &c., he can hold without noticing it himself: of course this necessitates your reading Barbot right through, and that means 668 pages folio in double column, or something like 2,772 pages of a modern book; but that's no matter, for he is uniformly charming and reeks with information.
Well, there are other places in Barbot where he speaks, evidently with convictions, of "this rascal fellow Black," &c. and gives long accounts of the way in which the black man cheats with false weights and measures, and adulterates; and if you absorb the whole of his information and test it against your own knowledge, and combine it with that of others, I think you will come to the conclusion that it is not necessary for the philanthropist to fidget about the way the European does his side to the trade; the moralist may drop a large and heavy tear on both white and black, but that is all that is required from him. Unfortunately this is not all that is done nowadays: the black has got hold of Governmental opinion, and just when he is more than keeping his end up in commercial transactions, he has got the Government to handicap his white fellow-trader with a mass of heavy dues and irritating restrictions, which will end most
