18 AFRICA AND HEE FUTURE. 



which is terribly cruel. It is very old. We know not 

 the time when it did not exist. Bat it has increased, 

 not only in extent but also in inhumanity, and is now 

 worse than ever before. It has been suppressed on the 

 Western coast, but continues over the Red Sea and 

 Indian Ocean and is entirely carried on by Arabs and 

 their slaves. Their encampments are established over 

 the heart of Africa, and the territory covered by their 

 raids is twice as large as the entire United States and is 

 continually being extended. The districts around these 

 encampments are kept in perpetual war to prevent com- 

 bination against them, and the traders destroy not only 

 every human being but every hut and plantation as 

 well. The lowest estimate places the number killed at 

 five times the number captured, and it is calculated that 

 slave traders are now destroying more than a thousand 

 persons per day in Africa. We can realize the effect of 

 the trade when we read the descriptions given by travel- 

 ers. Weisman tells that in 1882 he passed a town on 

 the Lomani River "with well-built huts, gardens of toma- 

 toes, pine apples, potatoes and fi.elds of tobacco and 

 sugar cane, with goats, sheep and fowls in abundance, 

 the town so extensive that their party marched through 

 it from six o'clock till eleven, and still saw the village 

 stretching off at one side." Four years afterward when he 

 passed there was the silence of death ; tall grass growing 

 over all ; charred poles and bleached skulls. Stanley, 

 in 1883, overtook an Arab slave caravan. " They had 

 been raiding," he says, "a territory covering 3,400 square 

 miles, containing a million of people, and they had 

 onlytwenty-three hundred captives and not one adult man 

 captive, after raiding through the length and breadth of 

 a country larger than Ireland and burning one hundred 

 and eighteen villages. An entire family had been put 

 to death for one child captive." And in his account of 

 his last journey he thus speaks of the work of a band 



