twelve Negro slaves, in return for
which the Indians were to be freed.

Las Casas, writing in his old age, owns his error: "This advice that
license should be given to bring Negro slaves to these lands, the Clerigo
Casas first gave, not considering the injustice with which the Portuguese
take them and make them slaves; which advice, after he had apprehended the
nature of the thing, he would not have given for all he had in the world.
For he always held that they had been made slaves unjustly and
tyrannically; for the same reason holds good of them as of the
Indians[72]."

As soon as the plan was broached a Savoyard, Lorens de Gomenot, Governor
of Bresa, obtained a monopoly of this proposed trade and shrewdly sold it
to the Genoese for twenty-five thousand ducats. Other monopolies were
granted in 1523, 1527, and 1528[73]. Thus the American trade became
established and gradually grew, passing successively into the hands of the
Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, and the English.

At first the trade was of the same kind and volume as that already passing
northward over the desert routes. Soon, however, the American trade
developed. A strong, unchecked demand for brute labor in the West Indies
and on the continent of America grew until it culminated in the eighteenth
century, when Negro slaves were crossing the Atlantic at the rate of fifty
to one hundred thousand a year. This called for slave raiding on a scale
that drew upon every part of Africa--upon the west coast, the western and
Egyptian Sudan, the valley of the Congo, Abyssinia, the lake regions, the
east coast, and Madagascar. Not simply the degraded and weaker types of
Negroes were seized, but the strong Bantu, the Mandingo and Songhay, the
Nubian and Nile Negroes, the Fula, and even the Asiatic Malay, were
represented in the raids.

There was thus begun in modern days a new slavery and slave trade. It was
different from that of the past, because more and more it came in time to
be founded on racial caste, and this caste was made the foundation of a
new industrial system. For four hundred years, from 1450 to 1850, European
civilization carried on a systematic trade in human beings of such
tremendous proportions that the physical, economic, and moral effects are
still plainly to be remarked throughout the world. To this must be added
the large slave trade of Mussulman lands, which began with the seventh
century and raged almost unchecked until the end of the nine