Anyway, the natives perished out of the islands of the Caribbean Sea with a rapidity which startled the conquerors.  The famous Bishop Las Casas pitied and tried to save the remnant that were left.  The Spanish settlers required labourers for the plantations.  On the continent of Africa were another race, savage in their natural state, which would domesticate like sheep and oxen, and learnt and improved in the white man’s company.  The negro never rose of himself out of barbarism; as his fathers were, so he remained from age to age; when left free, as in Liberia and in Hayti, he reverts to his original barbarism; while in subjection to the white man he showed then, and he has shown since, high capacities of intellect and character.  Such is, such was the fact.  It struck Las Casas that if negroes could be introduced into the West Indian islands, the Indians might be left alone; the negroes themselves would have a chance to rise out of their wretchedness, could be made into Christians, and could be saved at worst from the horrid fate which awaited many of them in their own country.

The black races varied like other animals:  some were gentle and timid, some were ferocious as wolves.  The strong tyrannised over the weak, made slaves of their prisoners, occasionally ate them, and those they did not eat they sacrificed at what they called their customs—­offered them up and cut their throats at the altars of their idols.  These customs were the most sacred traditions of the negro race.  They were suspended while the slave trade gave the prisoners a value.  They revived when the slave trade was abolished.  When Lord Wolseley a few years back entered Ashantee, the altars were coated thick with the blood of hundreds of miserable beings who had been freshly slaughtered there.  Still later similar horrid scenes were reported from Dahomey.  Sir Richard Burton, who was an old acquaintance of mine, spent two months with the King of Dahomey, and dilated to me on the benevolence and enlightenment of that excellent monarch.  I asked why, if the King was so benevolent, he did not alter the customs.  Burton looked at me with consternation.  ’Alter the customs!’ he said.  ’Would you have the Archbishop of Canterbury alter the Liturgy?’ Las Casas and those who thought as he did are not to be charged with infamous inhumanity if they proposed to buy these poor creatures from their captors, save them from Mumbo Jumbo, and carry them to countries where they would be valuable property, and be at least as well cared for as the mules and horses.

The experiment was tried and seemed to succeed.  The negroes who were rescued from the customs and were carried to the Spanish islands proved docile and useful.  Portuguese and Spanish factories were established on the coast of Guinea.  The black chiefs were glad to make money out of their wretched victims, and readily sold them.  The transport over the Atlantic became a regular branch of business.