chapter than the story of this trade in human flesh. The poor wretches snatched from Africa were herded like cattle in the fetid air of low and windowless ship pens. If water ran short, or famine threatened, or plague broke out, whole cargoes, living and dead, were hurled overboard by merciless masters. If a single victim, tortured into frenzy, lifted a finger against his captor, he was liable to be punished by a mutilation that defies description. While Ruskin has attempted to fix the picture of this trade in his immortal etching of Turner's Slave Ship, tossing under a heaven of broken clouds upon a storm-swept sea dotted with the bodies of victims, "girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror and mixes its flaming flood with sunlight—and cast far along the sepulchral waves—incarnadines the multitudinous sea," his luminous page sinks down into a dull glow when compared with the lurid leaves in the actual records of the slaving business.
Under the pressure of profitmakers the Southern colonists, always clamoring for cheap labor, were in time abundantly supplied with African bond men and even in the North, slavery spread as widely as economic conditions would permit. After tentative beginnings, the Negro population grew by leaps and bounds; on the eve of the Revolution it was more than half a million. In five colonies, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland, it equaled or exceeded the whites in number; even in Delaware and Pennsylvania, one-fifth of the inhabitants were Negroes. In New York one person in six, and in New England one in fifty sprang from African origins.
Though the figures were ominous, not many Englishmen made strenuous protests against slavery. The Quakers, as a rule, did not like it for it offended their religious scruples, and some of them openly declared that Christians could not tolerate it; but no extensive movement for abolition got under way until after Independence. There were, however, frequent outcries against the slave trade itself. An occasional far-seeing economist realized that, owing to
