victs and cutthroats, but it was bad enough.
Nothing was done to “ improve the condition ” of
the blacks. T he English Church did not recognise
them as baptisable human beings, and teaching
them was severely discountenanced. In the French
islands, the general treatment of slaves seems to
have been about as harsh and about as liable to barbarous
cruelty as in those under British sovereignty;
but the Catholic priests did credit them with souls
and made some effort to save them from perdition,
though never dreaming that they were entitled to
liberty in this world.
L e t us do the much-abused Spaniard one little
measure of justice. A fte r slavery became an established
institution in his colonies, the negroes were
not so badly treated as in Jamaica and Barbados, or
even in Martinique and Santa Cruz. T he Spaniard
became a real colonist in the West Indies. He lived
on his plantation, and peasants came out from A n dalusia
and Catalonia and from the Basque provinces
and settled in Cuba and Española and Puerto
Rico. T h e Spaniard became acclimatised and
learned to work and attend to business in his tropical
home, and as a consequence a majority of the
present natives of Cuba and Puerto Rico are whites,
or creoles, while in the other islands the negro
vastly preponderates in the population. The presence
of working white men and the direct interest
and supervision of owners living on their estates
certainly mitigated slavery in the Spanish West Indies,
where the negroes had certain recognised and
legally protected rights. Not only did the Church
look after their souls, but the State treated them as
human beings, albeit in abject servitude. Among
the rights guaranteed to them was that of free marriage,
the purchase of their own freedom by labour,
and the holding of property.
Except in the island of Haiti, the slave population
would have diminished constantly but for the continual
importation of fresh supplies. Most of the
negro women of the early slave-trade were landed
in Hispaniola, and the enterprising traffickers of a
later day dealt mostly in able-bodied men. Even
when women were brought over for the deliberate
purpose of breeding slaves there was no natural increase
of the race, but rather a falling off, until the
present century. T h e agitation for the suppression
of the African slave-trade began in England toward
the end of the last century, and was carried on with
great vigour under the lead of Wilberforce, Clarkson,
and other philanthropic men, who met with
the usual opposition to great reforms. Denmark was
the first to take practical action, and she declared the
slave trade unlawful in 1792. I t was abolished in
Great Britain and her colonies in 1807, and France
and Holland soon followed, while Spain brought up
the rear in 1820. There was a great deal of contraband
traffic after the formal abolition, especially in
Cuba, whose demand for labour was not well supplied.
It has been said that not less than 500,000
Africans were brought to the island and sold into
slavery after the traffic was prohibited, while Humboldt
estimated the total importation before 1820 at
4 I3)5°°-