fore the words were written, that "it is physically impossible for a brave man to make money the chief object of his thoughts."
When Congress reassembled in December after passing the act of March 3, 1819, the slave-trade came up for further consideration. The colonization society that established Liberia, of which the story is to be told, had, by its activity in various ways, increased the public knowledge of the evils of the slave-trade. Furthermore, it was able to reach the slave-holders for two reasons. First, it was pledged not to interfere with American slavery. Second, it was formed for the specific purpose of removing the slave-holder's chief eyesore, the free negro, out of the United States.
Undoubtedly there were in the United States many people who were opposed to the trade because of principle. But the student cannot overlook the fact that the feeling against the trade was able to make headway because there was no financial interest in slaves or slavers at the North, outside of a few ports, and at the South there were increasing numbers of slave-owners who had slaves to sell through the natural increase of their holdings. The fact that the coastwise trade had demanded consideration in the previous legislation is significant. Virginia was already the mother of an export trade in slaves. To prohibit absolutely the importation of wild Africans was to "bull the market" for the planters who found more profit in breeding slaves than in cultivating the soil.
Meantime the privateers, so-called, of the Latin-American republics had made alarming attacks on our unarmed merchant ships. Pirates swarmed over the West India seas, and their doings were justly be-
