England and Germany, from America and France, from Switzerland and Holland. Their stations are scattered all along the coast of Africa, from the south border of the desert to the Cape of Good Hope.
3. I have described all this as transitional—but it is more than this. The transitional aspects were confined to a preceding period of some 40 or 50 years, dating from about 1700; but these have now passed away. The remedial, the regenerative state of the Negro race and the continent of Africa, has now assumed a positive form, and reached a normal, and in some spots, an organic state; with both Christian and civilizing features. And these forms of fixed, and abiding, civilization are erowiim stronger and stronger every day, and taking deeper and deeper root. And there is an almost certain prospect, that a yet more thorough and radical growth will be theirs; as year by year, the work of grace, and the power of government and civilization go on, in the divers settlements of western Africa. All the auxiliaries fitted to these ends are now in use there, under the control of a most favoring providence. I beg to present here, in detail, these formative and creative agencies. (a) First of all there is the benfeent operation of legitimate Commerce. For nigh 3 centuries, commerce, on the coast of Africa, was divested of every feature, humane, generous, and gracious. Commerce then was a robber; commerce was a marauder; commerce was a devastator; a thief; a murderer! But commerce, now, under the beneficent hifiuence of Christianity, has become the handmaid of religion; and all along the coast of Africa
