teenth
century.

These were not days of decadence, but a period that gave the world
Shakespeare, Martin Luther, and Raphael, Haroun-al-Raschid and Abraham
Lincoln. It was the day of the greatest expansion of two of the world's
most pretentious religions and of the beginnings of the modern
organization of industry. In the midst of this advance and uplift this
slave trade and slavery spread more human misery, inculcated more
disrespect for and neglect of humanity, a greater callousness to
suffering, and more petty, cruel, human hatred than can well be
calculated. We may excuse and palliate it, and write history so as to let
men forget it; it remains the most inexcusable and despicable blot on
modern human history.

The Portuguese built the first slave-trading fort at Elmina, on the Gold
Coast, in 1482, and extended their trade down the west coast and up the
east coast. Under them the abominable traffic grew larger and larger,
until it became far the most important in money value of all the commerce
of the Zambesi basin. There could be no extension of agriculture, no
mining, no progress of any kind where it was so extensively carried
on[74].

It was the Dutch, however, who launched the oversea slave trade as a
regular institution. They began their fight for freedom from Spain in
1579; in 1595, as a war measure against Spain, who at that time was
dominating Portugal, they made their first voyage to Guinea. By 1621 they
had captured Portugal's various slave forts on the west coast and they
proceeded to open sixteen forts along the coast of the Gulf of Guinea.
Ships sailed from Holland to Africa, got slaves in exchange for their
goods, carried the slaves to the West Indies or Brazil, and returned home
laden with sugar. In 1621 the private companies trading in the west were
all merged into the Dutch West India Company, which sent in four years
fifteen thousand four hundred and thirty Negroes to Brazil, carried on war
with Spain, supplied even the English plantations, and gradually became
the great slave carrier of the day.

The commercial supremacy of the Dutch early excited the envy and emulation
of the English. The Navigation Ordinance of 1651 was aimed at them, and
two wars were necessary to wrest the slave trade from them and place it in
the hands of the English. The final terms of peace, among other things,
surrendered New Netherlands to England and opened the way for England to
become henceforth the world's greatest