ers,
with the dead and dying bodies of those that have fallen strewn along
the roadside. "The slave trade in Abyssinia is open, its horrors are
well known, and it is supported by the Christian Church of the country.
Such is slavery in the most Christian country in the world today, the
country which has the longest Christian history of any nation in the
world. Its existence helps us to realize the value of the statement that
the power of Christianity in the world destroyed the slave trade.
Slavery flourishes in the oldest of Christian countries in the world,
backed up by the Church, the Old Bible, and the New Testament. It has
all the horrors, all the brutalities, all the degradations of the slave
trade at its worst. Such is Christian Abyssinia, and such, but for the
saving grace of secular civilization, would be the rest of the world."
(_Chapman Cohen._)

The slave system that arose in Christian times, created by and continued
by Christians in the most Christian of countries, provides the final and
unanswerable indictment of the Christian Church.

Slavery was unknown to the Africans until it was introduced by the
Christian Portuguese. In 1517 the Spaniards began to ship negro slaves
to Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, and Porto Rica. John Hawkins was the first
Englishman of note to engage in the traffic, and Queen Elizabeth loaned
this virtuous and pious gentleman the ship _Jesus_. English companies
were licensed to engage in this trade and during the reign of William
and Mary it was thrown open to all.

Between 1680 and 1700, it has been said that 140,000 Negroes were
imported by the English-African Company, and about 160,000 more by
private traders. Between 1700 and 1786, as many as 610,000 were
transported to Jamaica alone. In the hundred years ending 1776, the
English carried into the Spanish, French, and English Colonies three
million slaves.

The cruelty experienced by these human cargoes on their transportation
defies description. The chaining, the branding, the mutilation, the
close quarters, the deaths by suffocation and disease, are a sterling
example of man's inhumanity to man when his conscience is relieved by
finding support of his inhumane actions sanctioned in that most holy of
holies, the Bible. Exclusive of the slaves who died before leaving
Africa, not more than fifty out of a hundred lived to work on the
plantations. Ingram's "History of Slavery" calculates that although
between 1690 and 1820 no less t