century, and look at this race of which we are speaking. What then incuts our eyes? Why we find one universal fact connected Avith the Negro race—the fact of universal slavery, and the slave trade. If we turned to the West Indies, whether under Danish, Spanish, Dutch or English, rule, the black man, everywhere, was a chattel. If we turned to the American continent, we would have found the race in the same position there, whether under the Protestant rule of the North American colonies, or under the Romish rule of the South American States. If we turned to Africa herself, we would have seen the whole extent of that vast continent given to the spoiler, robbed of her children—the vast interior converted into a hunting-ground for capturing miserable and wretched human beings;—drenched on every side with fraternal blood;—and the long line of the coast, for thousands of miles, evidencing, at every point, how prolific was the slave trade, in woes and agonies and murders, by the bleached bones, or the bloody tracks of its countless victims!
And what was the status of the Negro race at this time, in cither Europe or America? It is one of the sad results of crime that its deadly influences strike down deep into every part of the human constitution: it both dementates and demoralizes men. The slave trade not only lowered the nations that engaged in it, in the scale of humanity, and in the tone of their morals, but it robbed them of the clearness of their mental virion. They not only robbed the Negro of his freedom—they added another crime thereto: they denied his humanity. Yes, at the commencement of
