The passion for lucre excited on both sides gave rise to actions which bordered on sheer piracy, concerning which many a tale fell on my ear all along the Guinea coast.  Thus one Frenchman I met had been in command of a Spanish slaver, which was lying becalmed.  He victoriously repulsed the attacking boats of a British cruiser, and killed the lieutenant in command of her, who was the first to board the slave-ship, with his own hand.  A slight breeze and the fall of night enabled him to make good his escape.  But no more of this.  The negro trade and the suppression of it, the abuses on both sides, are all of them bygone things, bereft of interest.  Slavery is the one thing that remains.  It always has existed in Africa, and the steady progress made in that part of the globe by the Mohammedan religion, which admits slavery, as the basis of the social system, will no doubt still further help to perpetuate it.  Should all the black tribes merge into one huge Mussulman body, stirred at once by religious fanaticism and by a passion for slavery, a formidable difficulty will be added to those which already confront European action in the continent inhabited by the sons of Ham.

From the liberated Africans of Sierra Leone we came to another category.  A negro republic, with all the necessary impedimenta—­elections, assemblies, newspapers, and the most exaggerated form of Protestant Puritanism to boot.  This Liberian Republic, founded by an American religious body, is a sort of El Dorado for the exclusive benefit of freed negroes from the United States, and is absolutely forbidden ground to the white race.  After great difficulties to begin with, after being abandoned and repopulated more than once, after times of scarcity during which the miserable freed men bitterly regretted their lost servitude, the republic has ended by taking root.  There were about ten thousand inhabitants, doing nothing at all, for the free negro thinks and says, like his slave brother, “Work no good!” What did they live on then?  First of all, on the sunshine, and then by doing a kind of broker’s work between passing ships and the natives.  They vegetated in fact, and if they did not actually rot in idleness, they owed it to a tall Virginian mulatto, a very intelligent fellow, extraordinarily like Alphonse Karr in appearance, “Governor Roberts,” with whom I had several long and interesting talks.  He had been sharp enough to get hold of the key of the cashbox, and by that act had become the sole representative of the sovereign people.  In spite of the constitution, in spite of laws and regulations, all power was concentrated in his hands, and, save for the name, his republic was transformed into a tidy little dictatorship.