l clutches.

[Footnote 1: _Translator's 'Note_.--If Schopenhauer were writing
to-day, he would with equal truth point to the miseries of the African
trade. I have slightly abridged this passage, as some of the evils
against which he protested no longer exist.]

Other examples are furnished by Tshudi's _Travels in Peru_, in the
description which he gives of the treatment of the Peruvian soldiers
at the hands of their officers; and by Macleod's _Travels in Eastern
Africa_, where the author tells of the cold-blooded and truly devilish
cruelty with which the Portuguese in Mozambique treat their slaves.
But we need not go for examples to the New World, that obverse side of
our planet. In the year 1848 it was brought to life that in England,
not in one, but apparently in a hundred cases within a brief period, a
husband had poisoned his wife or _vice versa_, or both had joined in
poisoning their children, or in torturing them slowly to death by
starving and ill-treating them, with no other object than to get the
money for burying them which they had insured in the Burial Clubs
against their death. For this purpose a child was often insured in
several, even in as many as twenty clubs at once.[1]

[Footnote 1: Cf. _The Times_, 20th, 22nd and 23rd Sept., 1848, and
also 12th Dec., 1853.]

Details of this character belong, indeed, to the blackest pages in the
criminal records of humanity. But, when all is said, it is the
inward and innate character of man, this god _par excellence_ of the
Pantheists, from which they and everything like them proceed. In every
man there dwells, first and foremost, a colossal egoism, which breaks
the bounds of right and justice with the greatest freedom, as everyday
life shows on a small scale, and as history on every page of it on a
large. Does not the recognised need of a balance of power in Europe,
with the anxious way in which it is preserved, demonstrate that man
is a beast of prey, who no sooner sees a weaker man near him than he
falls upon him without fail? and does not the same hold good of the
affairs of ordinary life?

But to the boundless egoism of our nature there is joined more or
less in every human breast a fund of hatred, anger, envy, rancour and
malice, accumulated like the venom in a serpent's tooth, and waiting
only for an opportunity of venting itself, and then, like a demon
unchained, of storming and raging. If a man has no great occasion for
breaking out, he will end by tak