to invite, I should have come among the belligerents
near Tete when the war was raging at its height, instead of, as it
happened, when all was over. And again, when enabled to reach Loanda,
the resolution to do my duty by going back to Linyanti probably saved me
from the fate of my papers in the "Forerunner". And then, last of all,
this new country is partially opened to the sympathies of Christendom,
and I find that Sechele himself has, though unbidden by man, been
teaching his own people. In fact, he has been doing all that I was
prevented from doing, and I have been employed in exploring--a work
I had no previous intention of performing. I think that I see the
operation of the unseen hand in all this, and I humbly hope that it will
still guide me to do good in my day and generation in Africa.

Viewing the success awarded to opening up the new country as a
development of Divine Providence in relation to the African family,
the mind naturally turns to the probable influence it may have on negro
slavery, and more especially on the practice of it by a large portion of
our own race. We now demand increased supplies of cotton and sugar,
and then reprobate the means our American brethren adopt to supply our
wants. We claim a right to speak about this evil, and also to act in
reference to its removal, the more especially because we are of one
blood. It is on the Anglo-American race that the hopes of the world for
liberty and progress rest. Now it is very grievous to find one portion
of this race practicing the gigantic evil, and the other aiding, by
increased demands for the produce of slave labor, in perpetuating the
enormous wrong. The Mauritius, a mere speck on the ocean, yields sugar,
by means of guano, improved machinery, and free labor, equal in amount
to one fourth part of the entire consumption of Great Britain. On that
island land is excessively dear and far from rich: no crop can be raised
except by means of guano, and labor has to be brought all the way from
India. But in Africa the land is cheap, the soil good, and free labor
is to be found on the spot. Our chief hopes rest with the natives
themselves; and if the point to which I have given prominence, of
healthy inland commercial stations, be realized, where all the produce
raised may be collected, there is little doubt but that slavery among
our kinsmen across the Atlantic will, in the course of some years, cease
to assume the form of a necessity to even the sla