xxxviii PREFATORY LETTER. 



highest truth. Nor do they stop here. They tell him that 

 he is of a beastly origin, and only the king of brutes. Like 

 brutes he is to live and die — a mere machine, ruled by a 

 stern physical necessity, and therefore without moral blame 

 even in his most atrocious violations of human law. What 

 is this but to snap asunder the sacred bonds by which 

 men have been held together in social union? To such men 

 I have nothing to say. My remarks apply to those men 

 only who call themselves Christian freemen, and ought 

 therefore to be bound by the sacred principles which be- 

 long to that high name. 



The great sin of the slave-trade was not in the horrors 

 of the middle passage, or in the evil and degradation en- 

 dured by the poor African in the Colonies on the western 

 side of the Atlantic. Its greatest mischief was in its origin. 

 It set man against man, and tribe against tribe; and has 

 for centuries been the great barrier against all progress of 

 civilization, and all diffusion of Christian light through wide 

 portions of a great Continent : while by a hideous moral 

 transformation, it made some of the strongest nations of 

 Christian Europe the tempters, the apologists, the cowardly 

 accessories of a set of lawless savages and brutal murderers. 



If a man, who knew nothing of the miserable history 

 of Africa, were told of a map which represented the moral 

 condition of its inhabitants by shades of colour ; he would 

 naturally look for the brightest colours on the coast-line, 

 where the negro must have learnt wisdom by his commerce 

 with the civilized men of Europe. But alas, how different 

 has been the teaching! Where the Christian has most 

 trodden, his footsteps have been too often traced in colours 

 of blood : and where he has planted Colonies on the coast of 

 Africa, we do not see a zone of bright colours fringing the 

 frontier lines ; but we do see, in their stead, great waves as 

 black as ebony spreading themselves far inwards, till they 

 are lost in the better tints of the central continent. Such 



