indigenous inhabitants, where the export industries are wholly in the hands of the white population, and where white men are able to undertake at least some forms and some measure of manual labour, and a great deal of immediate supervision; how much more can be said of its importance in the tropical regions of the Continent where the white man is but a bird of passage, and where he is utterly incapable of manual labour? In the former regions, expropriation of the natives leads to an economic servitude, which for reasons already explained, will be accompanied by deeper social wrongs than in Europe: it may develop into actual slavery. In the latter regions it can at best, be but veiled slavery: at its worst it involves a Slave system more ferocious and destructive than any in the history of the world.
Let us examine the question of the land as it affects the inhabitants of tlhe tropical regions of Africa—i.e., roughly, three-fifths of that huge Continent.
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Circumstances have combined to create marked divergencies in the conditions generally prevailing in the eastern and in the western portion of tropical Africa respectively. We must look for the explanation in past history. Slavery and the slave trade imposed from outside ravaged both sections of the Continent for centuries. On the west the European was the scourge: on the east, mainly the Arab. The objects pursued differed radically, with corresponding results. On the west, except in Angola, the European system threw no roots into the soil: it did not maintain itself in the mainland as an institution. That was not its purpose. The slavers, and the Governments that employed or encouraged them, had no interests in Africa. Their interests lay outside Africa They were traders in African flesh and blood, not slave owners in Africa, using their slaves on African estates. Neither they, nor their clients, sought the economic development of Africa; but that of America, for which African labour was required. They looked upon Africa as a reservoir of human material tc exploit the soil, not of Africa, but of the New World. The result was, that while the slave trade decimated the population of Western Africa, it did not crush the spirit of its peoples. It did not destroy their independence. In some measure it served to intensify the passion for freedom among them
