724 COMMERCIAL STATIONS. 



of it by a large portion of our own race. We now demand in- 

 creased supplies of cotton and sugar, and then reprobate the 

 means our American brethren adopt to supply our wants. We 

 claim a right to speak about this evil, and also to act in reference 

 to its removal, the more especially because we are of one blood. 

 It is on the Anglo-American race that the hopes of the world for 

 liberty and progress rest. Now it is very grievous to find one 

 portion of this race practicing the gigantic evil, and the other 

 aiding, by increased demands for the produce of slave labor, in 

 perpetuating the enormous wrong. The Mauritius, a mere speck 

 on the ocean, yields sugar, by means of guano, improved ma- 

 chinery, and free labor, equal in amount to one fourth part of 

 the entire consumption of Great Britain. On that island land is 

 excessively dear and far from rich : no crop can be raised except 

 by means of guano, and labor has to be brought all the way 

 from India. But in Africa the land is cheap, the soil good, and 

 free labor is to be found on the spot. Our chief hopes rest with 

 the natives themselves ; and if the point to which I have given 

 prominence, of healthy inland commercial stations, be realized, 

 where all the produce raised may be collected, there is little doubt 

 but that slavery among our kinsmen across the Atlantic will, 

 in the course of some years, cease to assume the form of a neces- 

 sity to even the slaveholders themselves. Natives alone can 

 collect produce from the more distant hamlets, and bring it to 

 the stations contemplated. This is the system pursued so suc- 

 cessfully in Angola. If England had possessed that strip of land, 

 by civilly declining to enrich her "frontier colonists" by " Caffre 

 wars," the inborn energy of English colonists would have de- 

 veloped its resources, and the exports would not have been 

 £100,000 as now, but one million at least. The establishment 

 of the necessary agency must be a work of time, and greater diffi- 

 culty will be experienced on the eastern than on the western side 

 of the continent, because in the one region we have a people who 

 know none but slave-traders, while in the other we have tribes 

 who have felt the influence of the coast missionaries and of the 

 great Niger expedition ; one invaluable benefit it conferred was 

 the dissemination of the knowledge of English love of commerce 

 and English hatred of slavery, and it therefore was no failure. 

 But on the east there is a river which may become a good path- 



