so many years ago that they left their human flesh-eating relatives in the western Soudan.
As I have said before, these races of black people are not only superstitious and degraded to the last degree, but fearfully ignorant, non-progressive, and with a most meagre conception of the barest elementals in the science of civilization. Recorded history they have none, a fact that need no more surprise us, than that the great apes in their native forests about them have none, and for precisely the same reasons. This was the country and these were the people to which the slave-traders flocked and that furnished them their human freight to carry on their infernal, infamous traffic. The curse of rum had much to do with it. Both the slavers and the natives loved it, and by both it was gotten rid of and taken in large quantities. The whites drank it and they drank Madeira, too, when they could afford it, and moreover the rum was their medium of exchange, and the stuff that got the slaves for them, out of which the great fortunes were made.
Slaves were few and hard to get at first, the slavers having to purchase them from such tribes as had them for sale on the coast. Everyone considered the trade perfectly legitimate and honorable in the highest degree. One coast tribe of blacks being more powerful than a neighboring one, it would, upon defeating in battle the weaker one, capture a number of slaves, and these latter were disposed of to the slavers when they came for them. Not a few tribes were thus pitted against each other, and as time passed on and the victorious parties finding that they had a growing market for slaves, they began making their raids for no other purpose.
