rican ship exchanged
one slave for ten huge bales of tobacco. A second cargo of slaves
brought even larger dividends to the owners of the slave ship. Soon the
story of the financial returns of the traffic began to inflame the
avarice of England, Spain and Portugal. The slave trade was exalted to
the dignity of commerce in wheat and flour, coal and iron. Just as ships
are now built to carry China's tea and silk, India's indigo and spices,
so ships were built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the
kidnapping of African slaves, and the sale of these men to the sugar and
cotton planters of the West Indies and of America. Even the stories of
the gold and diamond fields of South Africa and Alaska have had less
power to inflame men's minds than the stories of the black men in the
forests of Africa, every one of whom was good for twenty guineas.

The London of 1700 experienced a boom in slave stocks as the London of
1900 in rubber stocks. Merchants and captains, after a few years'
absence, returned to London to buy houses, carriages and gold plate, and
by their political largesses to win the title of baronet, and even seats
in the House of Lords. This illusion of gold finally fell upon the
throne itself, and King William and Queen Mary lent the traffic royal
patronage. At the very time when men in Boston, exultant over the
success of their experiment in democracy, were writing home to London
about this ideal republic of God that had been set up at Plymouth, and
the orb of liberty began to flame with light and hope for New England,
this other orb began to fling out its rays of sorrow, disease and death
across Africa and the southern sands.

At length, in 1713, Queen Anne, in the Treaty of Utrecht, after a long
and arduous series of diplomatic negotiations, secured for the English
throne a monopoly of the slave traffic, and the writers of the time
spoke of this treaty as an event that would make the queen's name to be
eulogized as long as time should last. But two hundred years have
reversed the judgment of the civilized world. History now recalls Queen
Anne's monopoly of the slave traffic as it recalls the Black Death in
England, the era of smallpox in Scotland,--for one such treaty is
probably equal to two bubonic plagues, or three epidemics of cholera and
yellow fever.

Finally, an informal agreement was entered upon between the English
slave dealers, the Spaniards and Portuguese,--an agreement that was
literal