Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 | Page 5

and republicanism without liberty or freedom.
I pray God, that the protests and public appeals and remonstrances to Government of the Anti-Slavery Society may not end in barren results. But if the Leaguers and Democrats have their own way, its voice, though just and righteous, will be at length reduced to a faint cry, a last shriek of despair--overwhelmed by the loud laughs and jeers of the fiends, which possess the dealers in human flesh and blood, and surround unhappy and doomed Africa with a cordon of rapine and murder, of blood and flames!
"Where the vultures and vampires of Mammon resort, Where Columbia exulting drains Her life-blood from Africa's veins, Where the image of God is accounted as base, And the image of C?|sar set up in its place."
If I were asked, "What can be done for Africa?" I should reply with no new thing, no nostrums of my own concocting, but what has been reiterated again and again. Teach her children to till the soil--to cultivate available exports by which they may obtain in exchange, through the medium of a legitimate commerce, the European products and manufactures necessary for their use and enjoyment. Until this be done, nothing effectual will be done. In vain you send missionaries of religion, or agents of abolition; in vain you contract treaties with the Princes of Africa. It is humiliating to think, equally a disgrace to our religion as to our civilization, that our connexion with Africa has only served to plunge her into deeper misery and profounder degradation. With truth we here may apply the strong censure of a Chinese Emperor, "That the march of Christians is whitened with human bones." Wherever we have touched her western shores there our footsteps have been marked with blood and devastation. We have fostered and encouraged within the heart of Africa the most odious and unnatural passions. We have stimulated the prince to sell his subjects, the father to sell his child, the brother to sell the sister, the husband the wife, into thrice-accursed and again accursed slavery! We have done all and more than this, whilst we have convulsed every state and kingdom of Africa with war, for the supply of cargoes of human beings. And for what? To cultivate our miserable cotton and sugar plantations! These are the doctrines of mercy and charity which we have taught the poor untutored children of Africa. Happy for poor forlorn, dusky, naked Africa, had she never seen the pale visage or met the Satanic brow of the European Christian! Does any man in his senses, who believes in God and Providence, think that the wrongs of Africa will go on for ever unavenged? Already, has not Providence avenged the wrongs of Africa upon Spain and Portugal, by reducing their national character and consideration to the lowest in the European family of nations? And as to the United States of America, has not the boasted liberty of our Republican countrymen, who colonized America, become a by-word, a hissing, and a scorn, amongst the nations of the earth? Have not these slave-holding Americans committed acts, nationally, within the last few years, which the most absolute Governments of Europe would blush to be guilty of? And what is one of their last acts, on a smaller scale, but not less decisively indicative of their national morality? The New York Bible Society has declared that it will not give the Bible to slaves, even when they are able to read the Bible! Would the Czar of Russia permit such an impious rule as this to be made by his nobles for their slaves or serfs? Such an action would render the liberties of a thousand republics a mockery, a snare, and a delusion, and their names infamous throughout the world.
And the time of us Englishmen will come next--our day of infamy! unless we show ourselves worthy that transcendant position in which Providence has placed us, at the pinnacle of the empires of Earth, as the leaders and champions of universal freedom.
In noticing the efforts made for raising Africa from her immemorial degradation, we are bound to confess our obligations to the Mahometans for what they have done. If they have extirpated Christianity from the soil of North Africa, and planted, instead of this tree of fair and pure fruit, the more glaring and showy plant of Islamism, they have, at the same time, endeavoured to raise Africa to their own level of demi-civilization. Whilst we condemn their slave-traffic as we condemn our own, we must do justice to the efforts which they have made, by the spread of their creed and the diffusion of their commerce, during a series of ten or twelve centuries, for promoting the civilization of Africa. They have succeeded, they have done infinitely more for Africa than