A bona fide emigration, a free engage system, would be a boon to Western and Inner Africa, where the tribes live in an almost continual state of petty warfare.  The anti-slavers and the abolitionists, of course, represent this to be the effect of the European trade in man’s flesh and blood; but it prevails, and has ever prevailed, and long will prevail, even amongst peoples which have never sent a head of negro to the coast.  And there is a large class of men captured in battle, and a host of those condemned to death by savage superstition, whose lives can be saved only by their exportation, which, indeed, is the African form of transportation.  “We believe,” says the Abbe Proyart (1776), “that the father sells his son and the prince his subjects; he only who has lived among them can know that it is not even lawful for a man to sell his slave, if he be born in the country, unless he have incurred that penalty by certain crimes specified by law.”

It will be objected that any scheme of the kind must be so involved in complicated difficulties that it cannot fail to degenerate into the old export slave-trade.  This I deny.  Admitting that such must at first be its tendency, I am persuaded that the details can so be controlled as to secure the use without the abuse.  Women and children, for instance, should never be allowed on board ship, unless accompanying husbands and parents.  Those who speak some words of a foreign tongue, English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese, and on the eastern coast Hindostani, might lead the way, to be followed in due time by the wilder races.  Probably the best ground for the trial would be the Island of Zanzibar, where we can completely control its operations.  And what should lend us patience and courage to meet and to beat down all difficulties is the consideration that success will be the sole possible means, independent of El Islam, of civilizing, or rather of humanizing, the Dark Continent.  The excellent Abbe Proyart begins his “History of Loango” with the wise and memorable words:  “Touching the Africans, these people have vices,—­what people is exempt from vice?  But, were they even more wicked and more vicious, they would be so much the more entitled to the commiseration and good offices of their fellow-men, and, should the missionary despair of making them Christians, men ought still to endeavour to make them men.”

The “Free Emigration” schemes hitherto attempted have been mere snares and delusions; chiefly, I hold, because the age was not ripe for them.  In 1844 three agencies were established at Sierra Leone for supplying hands to British Guiana, Trinidad and Jamaica.  As wages they offered per diem $0.75 to $1, with leave to return at pleasure; the “liberated” preferred, however, to live upon sixpence at home, suspecting that the bait was intended as a lure to captivity.  Nor were their fears lulled by the fact that the agents shipped amongst 250 “volunteers” some seventy-six wild slaves, fresh captives, who