greater loser of the two. Then the presence of millions of a
degraded race makes amalgamation or transportation impossible
; there they must remain; if they cannot he elevated,
they must prove a down-drag, a moral millstone on the
neck, an evil beyond remedy; a severe retribution on
the descendants of those who were goaded on by our own
forefathers in the slave-trade. But we do not believe in any
incapacity of the African in either mind or heart; and our
American brethren deserve our warmest sympathy in the
gigantic task before them. From the evils connected with
the slave-trade our statesmen have nobly striven to rescue
and defend u s; and no reasonable expense, that preserves us
from contamination, should be esteemed a sacrifice: if we
escape, it is not because, as a nation, we are innocent.
In reference to the status of the Africans among the
nations of the earth, we have seen nothing to justify the
notion that they are of a different “ breed ” or “ species § from
the most civilized. The African is a man with every attribute
of human kind. Centuries of barbarism have had the
same deteriorating effects on Africans, as Pritchard describes
them to have had on certain of the Irish who were driven,
some generations back, to the hills in Ulster and Connaught.
And these depressing influences have had such moral and
physical effects on some tribes, that ages probably will be
required to undo what ages have done. This degradation,
however, would hardly be given as a reason for holding any
race in bondage, unless the advocate had sunk morally to the
same low state. Apart from the frightful loss of life in the
process by which, it is pretended, the negroes are better provided
for than in a state of liberty in their own country, it
is this very system that perpetuates, if not causes, the un-
happy condition with which the comparative comfort of some
of them in slavery is contrasted.
Ethnologists reckon the African as by no means the lowest
of the human family. He is nearly as strong physically as
the European, and, as a race, is. wonderfully persistent among
the nations of the earth. Neither the diseases nor the ardent
spirits which proved so fatal to North American Indians,
South Sea Islanders, and Australians, seem capable of annihilating
the negroes. Even when subjected to that system so
destructive to human life, by which they are tom from their
native soil, they spring up irrepressibly and darken half the
new continent. They are gifted by nature with physical
strength capable of withstanding the, sorest privations, and a
lightheartedness which, as a sort of compensation, enables
them to make the best of the worst situations. I t is like that
power which the human frame possesses of withstanding heat,
and to an extent which we should never have known, had not
an adventurous surgeon gone into an oven and burnt his
fingers with his own watch. The Africans have wonderfully
bome up under unnatural conditions, that would have proved
fatal to most races.
I t is remarkable that the power of resistance under calamity,
or, as some would say, adaptation for a life of servitude, is peculiar
only to certain tribes oh the Continent of Africa. Climate
cannot be made to account for the fact that many would pine
in a state of slavery, or voluntarily perish.- No Erooman ban
be converted into a slave, and yet he is an inhabitant of the
low, unhealthy West Coast. Nor can any of the Zulu or
Kaffir tribes be reduced to bondage, though all these live
on comparatively elevated regions. We have heard it
stated by men familiar with some of the Kaffirs, that a blow,
given even in play by a European, must be returned. A love
of liberty is observable in all who have the Zulu blood, as the
Makololo, the Watuta, and probably the Masai. But blood
does not explain the fact. A beautiful Barotse woman at
Naliele, on refusing to marry a man whom she did not
like, was in a pet given by the headman to some Mambari
slave-traders from Benguela. Seeing her fate, she seized one
of their spears, and, stabbing herself, fell down dead.