ons of defence or of destruction: they appear incapable of forming any extensive plan of government, or of conquest; and the obvious inferiority of their mental faculties has been discovered and abused by the nations of the temperate zone."[1] Gibbon made this assertion as a fact of history, not many years before the commencement of this century. Never before had the nations beheld any thing the reverse of his description. Nigh thirty centuries of the world's existence had rolled along, and yet an almost palpable gloom had brooded over the multitudinous masses of that thickly crowded continent. During the flight of those dark ages, not a healthful motion was given to the almost deadened life of its crowded population. The discoveries of Columbus took place, the Reformation ensued, and the art of printing was invented. These events revived the languid pulse of Europe, and stirred into activity the energies and skill of India, and broke up the perpetual solitudes of America, and poured therein life, civilization, and enlightenment.
But to my poor father-land they brought chains and slavery, and the cruel desolations and the harrowing atrocities of the slave trade, and the untold horrors of the mid-passage, and a deeper depth of misery and anguish than Africa had ever known in all her dark histories before. And thus from 1562, down to the commencement of this century, the dark and bloody history of Africa was lengthened out and
- ↑ Book 5. In quoting this remark, I would be understood as referring it to the tribes and nations south of the desert only.
