Polygamy is almost universal in Africa, and poor woman is the greater sufferer from the accursed system.  It is not enough that she is drained of her beauty and strength by the savage passions of man:  she is the merest abject slave everywhere.  The young women are beautiful, but it is only for a brief season:  it soon passes like the fragile rose into the ashes of premature old age.  In Dahomey she is a soldier; in Kaffir-land she tends the herds, and builds houses; and in Congo without her industry man would starve.  Everywhere man’s cruel hand is against her.  Everywhere she is the slave of his unholy passions.[79]

It is a mistaken notion that has obtained for many years, that the Negro in Africa is physically the most loathsome of all mankind.  True, the Negro has been deformed by degradation and abuse; but this is not his normal condition.  We have seen native Africans who were jet black, woolly-haired, and yet possessing fine teeth, beautiful features, tall, graceful, and athletic.

“In reference to the status of the Africans among the nations of the earth, we have seen nothing to justify the notion that they are of a different ‘breed’ or ‘species’ from the most civilized.  The African is a man with every attribute of human kind.  Centuries of barbarism have had the same deteriorating effects on Africans as Prichard describes them to have had on certain of the Irish who were driven, some generations back, to the hills in Ulster and Connaught; and these depressing influences have had such moral and physical effects on some tribes, that ages probably will be required to undo what ages have done.  This degradation, however, would hardly be given as a reason for holding any race in bondage, unless the advocate had sunk morally to the same low state.  Apart from the frightful loss of life in the process by which, it is pretended, the Negroes are better provided for than in a state of liberty in their own country, it is this very system that perpetuates, if not causes, the unhappy condition with which the comparative comfort of some of them in slavery is contrasted.

“Ethnologists reckon the African as by no means the lowest of the human family.  He is nearly as strong physically as the European; and, as a race, is wonderfully persistent among the nations of the earth.  Neither the diseases nor the ardent spirits which proved so fatal to North-American Indians, South-Sea Islanders, and Australians, seem capable of annihilating the Negroes.  Even when subjected to that system so destructive to human life, by which they are torn from their native soil, they spring up irrepressibly, and darken half the new continent.  They are gifted by nature with physical strength capable of withstanding the sorest privations, and a lightheartedness which, as a sort of compensation, enables them to make the best of the worst situations.  It is like that power which the human frame possesses of withstanding heat, and to an extent which we should