Froude and his
fellow-colonialists, be scored off the moral code of Britain, since
they "do not pay" in tangible pelf, in self-aggrandisement, or in
dazzling prestige.

The statement that many negroes who were sold to the dealers in the
factories were "slaves [168] already to worse masters" is, in the face
of facts which could not possibly have been unknown to him, a piece of
very daring assertion. But this should excite no wonder, considering
that precise and scrupulous accuracy would be fatal to the
discreditable cause to which he so shamelessly proclaims his adhesion.
As being familiar since early childhood with members of almost every
tribe of Africans (mainly from or arriving by way of the West Coast)
who were brought to our West Indies, we are in a position to contradict
the above assertion of Mr. Froude's, its unfaltering confidence
notwithstanding. We have had the Madingoes, Foulahs, Houssas, Calvers,
Gallahs, Karamenties, Yorubas, Aradas, Cangas, Kroos, Timnehs, Veis,
Eboes, Mokoes, Bibis, and Congoes, as the most numerous and important
of the tribal contribution of Africa to the population of these
Colonies. Now, from what we have intimately learned of these people
(excepting the Congoes, who always appeared to us an inferior tribe to
all the others), we unhesitatingly deny that even three in ten of the
whole number were ever slaves in their own country, in the sense of
having been born under any organized [169] system of servitude. The
authentic records relating to the enslavement of Africans, as a regular
systematized traffic, do not date further back than five centuries ago.
It is true that a great portion of ancient literature and many
monuments bear distinct evidence, all the more impressive because
frequently only casual, that, from the earliest ages, the Africans had
shared, in common with other less civilized peoples, the doom of having
to furnish the menial and servile contingents of the more favoured
sections of the human family. Now, dating from, say, five hundred
years ago, which was long indeed after the disappearance of the old
leading empires of the world, we have (save and except in the case of
Arab incursionists into the Eastern and Northern coasts) no reliable
authority for saying, or even for supposing, that the tribes of the
African interior suffered from the molestations of professional
man-hunters.

It was the organization of the West Coast slave traffic towards the
close of the s