of older days, and the victims, hurriedly crowded into slave-decks but a
few feet high, suffered ten-fold torments on the middle passage from
inadequate supplies of food and water.

The colonists, even in their early feebleness, set their face resolutely
against the slave trade: its repression was a cardinal principle. Their
first serious wars were waged on its account. Ashmun risked his life in
the destruction of the factories at New Cesters and elsewhere. The
slavers, warned by many encounters, forsook at first the immediate
neighborhood of the settlements, and, as the coast line was gradually
taken up, abandoned at length, after many a struggle, the entire region.
Six hundred miles of the coast was permanently freed from an inhuman and
demoralizing traffic that defied every effort of the British naval
force. Nor was this all. The natives were reconciled by the introduction
of a legitimate commerce which supplied all they had sought from the
sale of human beings.

In still another way did the colony exercise a humane influence. Among
the natives exists a domestic slavery so cruel and barbarous that the
lot of the American plantation Negro seemed paradise in comparison. Life
and limb are held of such small value that severe mutilation is the
penalty of absurdly slight transgressions, or is imposed at the
arbitrary displeasure of the master, while more serious offenses are
punished by death in atrocious form: as when the victim is buried alive
with stakes driven through his quivering body.[16] The institution is of
course a difficult one to uproot. But among the natives in the more
thickly settled portions of the country it has ceased, and is mitigated
wherever the influence of the Government penetrates, while the number of
victims is greatly diminished by the cessation of inter-tribal warfare.