, hot,
healthless nights of 720 human beings! At sundown, when they were carried
below, trained slaves received the poor wretches one by one, and laying
each creature on his side in the wings, packed the next against him, and
the next, and the next, and so on, till like so many spoons packed away
they fitted into each other a living mass. Just as they were packed so
must they remain, for the pressure prevented any movement or the turning
of hand or foot, until the next morning, when from their terrible night of
horror they were brought on deck once more, weak and worn and sick." Then,
after all had come up and been splashed with salt water from the pumps,
men went below to bring up the dead. There was never a morning search of
this sort that was fruitless. The stench, the suffocation, the
confinement, oftentimes the violence of a neighbor, brought to every dawn
its tale, of corpses, and with scant gentleness all were brought up and
thrown over the side to the waiting sharks. The officer who had this
experience writes also that it was thirty days after capturing the slaver
before he could land his helpless charges.

No great moral evil can long continue when the attention of men has been
called to it, and when their consciences, benumbed by habit, have been
aroused to appreciation of the fact that it is an evil. To be sure, we,
with the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors and our minds filled with
a horror which their teachings instilled, sometimes think that they were
slow to awaken to the enormity of some evils they tolerated. So perhaps
our grandchildren may wonder that we endured, and even defended,
present-day conditions, which to them will appear indefensible. And so
looking back on the long continuance of the slave-trade, we wonder that it
could have made so pertinacious a fight for life. We marvel, too, at the
character of some of the men engaged in it in its earlier and more lawful
days, forgetting that their minds had not been opened, that they regarded
the negro as we regard a beeve. If in some future super-refined state men
should come to abstain from all animal food, perhaps the history of the
Chicago stock-yards will be as appalling as is that of the Bight of Benin
to-day, and that the name of Armour should be given to a great industrial
school will seem as curious as to us it is inexplicable that the founder
of Fanueil Hall should have dealt in human flesh.

It is, however, a chapter in the story of the