It was now time for the Europeans to embrace the opportunity, which this intercourse had thus afforded them, of carrying their schemes into execution, and of fixing them on such a permanent foundation, as should secure them future success.  They had already discovered, in the different interviews obtained, the chiefs of the African tribes.  They paid their court therefore to these, and so compleatly intoxicated their senses with the luxuries, which they brought from home, as to be able to seduce them to their designs.  A treaty of peace and commerce was immediately concluded:  it was agreed, that the kings, on their part, should, from this period, sentence prisoners of war and convicts to European servitude; and that the Europeans should supply them, in return, with the luxuries of the north.  This agreement immediately took place; and thus begun that commerce, which makes so considerable a figure at the present day.

But happy had the Africans been, if those only, who had been justly convicted of crimes, or taken in a just war, had been sentenced to the severities of servitude!  How many of those miseries, which afterwards attended them, had been never known; and how would their history have saved those sighs and emotions of pity, which must now ever accompany its perusal.  The Europeans, on the establishment of their western colonies, required a greater number of slaves than a strict adherence to the treaty could produce.  The princes therefore had only the choice of relinquishing the commerce, or of consenting to become unjust.  They had long experienced the emoluments of the trade; they had acquired a taste for the luxuries it afforded; and they now beheld an opportunity of gratifying it, but in a more extentive manner. Avarice therefore, which was too powerful for justice on this occasion, immediately turned the scale:  not only those, who were fairly convicted of offences, were now sentenced to servitude, but even those who were suspected.  New crimes were invented, that new punishments might succeed.  Thus was every appearance soon construed into reality; every shadow into a substance; and often virtue into a crime.

Such also was the case with respect to prisoners of war.  Not only those were now delivered into slavery, who were taken in a state of publick enmity and injustice, but those also, who, conscious of no injury whatever, were taken in the arbitrary skirmishes of these venal sovereigns.  War was now made, not as formerly, from the motives of retaliation and defence, but for the sake of obtaining prisoners alone, and the advantages resulting from their sale.  If a ship from Europe came but into sight, it was now considered as a sufficient motive for a war, and as a signal only for an instantaneous commencement of hostilities.