PREFATORY LETTER. xxxv 



agriculture and productive industry will improve rapidly; 

 and Angola will throw out crops a hundred-fold the value 

 of what it now produces. 



There is an enormous disproportion between the num- 

 bers of the coloured and white men of Angola. Dr Living- 

 stone mentions one district in which out of nearly 14,000 

 there are only ten white men. What is the proportion of 

 free half-castes is not stated. In other parts of the province 

 the relative numbers are, of course, very widely different. 

 The state of morals under such a condition of society must 

 inevitably be low. But let no Englishman too proudly 

 blame the rulers of Loanda for their slave-gangs, or for 

 their having sometimes, perhaps, shut their eyes to a smug- 

 gling export of negroes from their coast. I am old enough 

 to remember the dreary time when the brave indignant 

 oratory of Fox, the majestic eloquence of Pitt, and the 

 silver voice of Wilberforce (speaking like an angel in the 

 cause of mercy and truth and national honour), were heard 

 in vain in St Stephen's Chapel ; when, year after year, the 

 representatives of free England sanctioned and commended 

 a vile unchristian trade in the flesh and blood of the men 

 of Africa. Vain were the pleadings of Christian love and 

 national honour, when the children of mammon were allowed 

 to hold the balance while the debate was going on. Yet our 

 temptation to wrong was not comparable to that of the 

 governors of Loanda. They inherited a bad polity, which 

 put them in moral fetters; from which they had not then, 

 nor have they now, the power of gaining an instant free- 

 dom. But they have the power to mitigate the horrors of 

 the imported slave-gangs, and perhaps to put them down : 

 and now that there is an opening, we may hope that they 

 will effectually encourage a humane, free commerce with 

 central Africa. 



They brought with them to Loanda the sentiments of 

 honour and humanity they had been taught in Christian 



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