Page:A pilgrimage to my motherland.djvu/72

This page has been validated.
TO MY MOTHERLAND.
63

slave, and doubtless thought of his youthful home and dear parents from whom he was stolen. He admitted all I said, and observed that he wished there was no such thing; but while it existed it was better that they be exposed in the markets than that they should be sold privately, "for then bad men would seize the defenseless and our children, and we would not know where to find them."

The Mohammedans do not sell their co-religionists into slavery: they sometimes hold them as slaves, but only when they were bought as heathens and con-verted after coming into their possession; but these are never after sold. Here is a vast difference from that class of Christians, so called, who buy and sell the members of their own church, the partakers of the same communion with themselves. How much better are such than the heathens, or even these benighted Mussulmans?

Although, as I have before shown, slavery in Africa is not like slavery in America, or even as it is in Cuba, yet it is still a fact which must not be disregarded, that, more or less, it is slavery—such, it is true, as the teachings and example of good men might quietly but certainly in time overthrow, but which might also by an obverse course assume most of the abhorrent phases of the American institution. My own