West of Yoruba on the lower courses of the Niger is Benin, an ancient state which in 1897 traced its twenty-three kings back one thousand years; some legends even named a line of sixty kings.  It seems probable that Benin developed the imperial idea and once extended its rule into the Congo valley.  Later and also to the west of the Yoruba come two states showing a fiercer and ruder culture, Dahomey and Ashanti.  The state of Dahomey was founded by Tacondomi early in the seventeenth century, and developed into a fierce and bloody tyranny with wholesale murder.  The king had a body of two thousand to five thousand Amazons renowned for their bravery and armed with rifles.  The kingdom was overthrown by the French in 1892-93.  Under Sai Tutu, Ashanti arose to power in the seventeenth century.  A military aristocracy with cruel blood sacrifices was formed.  By 1816 the king had at his disposal two hundred thousand soldiers.  The Ashanti power was crushed by the English in the war of 1873-74.

In these states and in later years in Benin the whole character of west-coast culture seems to change.  In place of the Yoruban culture, with its city democracy, its elevated religious ideas, its finely organized industry, and its noble art, came Ashanti and Dahomey.  What was it that changed the character of the west coast from this to the orgies of war and blood sacrifice which we read of later in these lands?

There can be but one answer:  the slave trade.  Not simply the sale of men, but an organized traffic of such proportions and widely organized ramifications as to turn the attention and energies of men from nearly all other industries, encourage war and all the cruelest passions of war, and concentrate this traffic in precisely that part of Africa farthest from the ancient Mediterranean lines of trade.

We need not assume that the cultural change was sudden or absolute.  Ancient Yoruba had the cruelty of a semi-civilized land, but it was not dominant or tyrannical.  Modern Benin and Dahomey showed traces of skill, culture, and industry along with inexplicable cruelty and bloodthirstiness.  But it was the slave trade that turned the balance and set these lands backward.  Dahomey was the last word in a series of human disasters which began with the defeat of the Askias at Tenkadibou.[26]

From the middle of the fifteenth to the last half of the nineteenth centuries the American slave trade centered in Guinea and devastated the coast morally, socially, and physically.  European rum and fire arms were traded for human beings, and it was not until 1787 that any measures were taken to counteract this terrible scourge.  In that year the idea arose of repatriating stolen Negroes on that coast and establishing civilized centers to supplant the slave trade.  About four hundred Negroes from England were sent to Sierra Leone, to whom the promoters considerately added sixty white prostitutes as wives.  The climate on the low coast, however, was so deadly that new