Ixxviii PREFATORY LETTER. 



How, we may ask, is any European state to obtain free 

 labourers from the black men of Africa? Only, we may 

 reply with confidence, by a base bargain with the old slave- 

 dealers of that Continent. And were we to grant (and any 

 man of common sense may think this a very large grant) that 

 the African would be treated well, and truly dealt with as a 

 free labourer in the western Colonies; that would not touch 

 the fundamental objection to the plan. The great mischief of 

 slavery and slave-dealing is, I repeat, at the fountain-head. 

 Plausible as some men may have thought the previous sugges- 

 tion ; it would, if carried into effect, not only help to perpetu- 

 ate the present terrible social evils which afflict large portions 

 of Africa, but it would also very greatly aggravate them; and 

 it might perhaps extinguish, for many years to come, those 

 warm hopes for the good of Africa which have been kindled 

 among Christian men, and have had their issue in labours of 

 love — the noblest example of which shines out in the Mission- 

 ary Travels of Livingstone. 



God forbid that any state in Christendom, after it had 

 washed its hands of a foul, selfish and inhuman policy, should, 

 in the 19th century, be so grovelling as to return to it! Good 

 men who in their hearts believe in a superintending Provi- 

 dence, believe also that the moral and physical laws of nature, 

 are so ordained that, even in this world, good will have, in 

 the end, its triumph over evil. But when that end is to be, 

 and by what alternations of good and evil it is to be brought 

 about, no mortal man can tell: and it is a vain task for 

 him to strain his sight in trying to look through the dark- 

 ness that clouds the future. He knows, too, that unmixed 

 good there never can be in this world, while it is held together 

 by those great laws to which all nature, moral as well as 

 physical, is compelled to yield obedience. 



Still a Christian lives in hope ; and with God's help can 

 do his duty manfully and cheerfully: not like one who is 

 dismayed and stupified by the many evils that he sees around 



