CHAPTER XXIX.

CONCLUSION.

Two gods divide them all-pleasure and gain :

For these they live, they sacrifice to these,

And in their service wage perpetual war

With conscience and with thee. Lust in their hearts,
And mischief in their hands, they roam the earth
To prey upon each other; stubborn, fierce,
High-minded, pouring out their own disgrace.
Thy prophets speak of such; and, noting down
The features of the last degenerate times,
Exhibit every lineament of these.

Come then, and added to thy many crowns,
Receive one yet, as radiant as the rest,
Due to thy last and most effectual work,
Thy word fulfilled, the conquest of a world.

Cowper-The Task.

WE We have now followed the Europeans to every region of the globe, and seen them planting colonies, and peopling new lands, and everywhere we have found them the same-a lawless and domineering race, seizing on the earth as if they were the firstborn of creation, and having a presumptive right to murder and dispossess all other people. For more than three centuries we have glanced back at them in their course, and everywhere they have had the word of God in their mouth, and the deeds of darkness in

their hands. In the first dawn of discovery, forth they went singing the Te Deum, and declaring that they went to plant the cross amongst the heathen. As we have already observed, however, it turned out to be the cross of one of the two thieves, and a bitter cross of crucifixion it has proved to the natives where they have received it. It has stood the perpetual sign of plunder and extermination. The Spaniards were reckless in their carnage of the Indians, and all succeeding generations have expressed their horror of the Spaniards. The Dutch were cruel, and everybody abominated their cruelty. One would have thought that the world was grown merciful. Behold North America at this moment, with its disinherited Indians! See Hindustan, that great and swarming region of usurpations and exactions! Look at the Cape, and ask the Caffres whether the English are tender-hearted and just: ask the same question in New Holland: ask it of the natives of Van Dieman's Land,―men, transported from the island of their fathers. Ask the New Zealanders whether the warriors whose tattooed heads stare us in the face in our museums, were not delicately treated by us. Go, indeed, into any one spot, of any quarter of the world, and ask-no you need not ask, you shall hear of our aggressions from every people that know us. The words of Red-Jacket will find an echo in the hearts of tens of millions of sorrowful and expatriated and enthralled beings, who will exclaim, "you want more land! you want our country!" It is needless to tell those who have read this history that there is, and can be, nothing else like it in the whole record of mortal crimes. Many are the evils that are done

under the sun; but there is and can be no evil like that monstrous and earth-encompassing evil, which the Europeans have committed against the Aborigines of every country in which they have settled. And in what country have they not settled? It is often said as a very pretty speech-that the sun never sets on the dominions of our youthful Queen; but who dares to tell us the far more horrible truth, that it never sets on the scenes of our injustice and oppressions! When we have taken a solemn review of the astounding transactions recorded in this volume, and then add to them the crimes against humanity committed in the slave-trade and slavery, the account of our enormities is complete; and there is no sum of wickedness and bloodshed-however vast, however monstrous, however enduring it may be-which can be pointed out, from the first hour of creation, to be compared for a moment with it.

The slave-trade, which one of our best informed philanthropists asserts is going on at this moment to the amount of 170,000 negroes a year, is indeed the dreadful climax of our crimes against humanity. It was not enough that the lands of all newly discovered regions were seized on by fraud or violence; it was not enough that their rightful inhabitants were murdered or enslaved; that the odious vices of people styling themselves the followers of the purest of beings should be poured like a pestilence into these new countries. It was not enough that millions on millions of peaceful beings were exterminated by fire, by sword, by heavy burdens, by base violence, by deleterious mines and unaccustomed severities-by dogs, by man-hunters, and by grief and despair-there yet

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wanted one crowning crime to place the deeds of Europeans beyond all rivalry in the cause of evil,—and that unapproachable abomination was found in the slave-trade. They had seized on almost all other countries, but they could not seize on the torrid regions of Africa. They could not seize the land, but they could seize the people. They could not destroy them in their own sultry clime, fatal to the white men, they therefore determined to immolate them on the graves of the already perished Americans. To shed blood upon blood, to pile bones upon bones, and curses upon curses. What an idea is that!-the Europeans standing with the lash of slavery in their hands on the bones of exterminated millions in one hemisphere, watching with remorseless eyes their victims dragged from another hemisphere-tilling, not with their sweat, but with their heart's blood, the soil which is, in fact, the dust of murdered generations of victims. To think that for three centuries this work of despair and death has been going on-for three centuries!-while Europe has been priding itself on the growth of knowledge and the possession of the Christian faith; while mercy, and goodness, and brotherly love, have been preached from pulpits, and wafted towards heaven in prayers! That from Africa to America, across the great Atlantic, the ships of outrage and agony have been passing over, freighted with human beings denied all human rights. The mysteries of God's endurance, and of European audacity and hyrocrisy are equally marvellous. Why, the very track across the deep seems to me blackened by this abominable traffic;there must be the dye of blood in the very ocean. One might surely trace these monsters by the smell of

death, from their kidnapping haunts to the very sugarmills of the west, where canes and human flesh are ground together. The ghosts of murdered millions, were enough, one thinks, to lead the way without chart or compass! The very bed of the ocean must be paved with bones! and the accursed trade is still going on! We are still strutting about in the borrowed plumes of Christianity, and daring to call God our father, though we are become the tormentors of the human race from China to Peru, and from one pole to the other !*

The whole history of European colonization is of a piece. It is with grief and indignation, that passing before my own mind the successive conquests and colonies of the Europeans amongst the native tribes of newly-discovered countries, I look in vain for a single instance of a nation styling itself Christian and civilized, acting towards a nation which it is pleased to term barbarous with Christian honesty and common feeling. The only opportunity which the aboriginal tribes have had of seeing Christianity in its real form and nature, has been from William Penn and the missionaries. But both Penn and the missionaries have in every instance found their efforts neutralized, and their hopes of permanent good to their fellowcreatures blasted, by the profligacy and the unprincipled rapacity of the Europeans as a race. Never was there a race at once so egotistical and so terrible! With the most happy complacency regarding them

* Everything connected with this trade is astonishing. Queen Elizabeth eagerly embarked in it in 1563, and sent the notorious John Hawkins, knighted by her for this and similar deeds, out to Sierra Leone for a human cargo, with four vessels, three of which, as if it were the most pious of expeditions, bore the names of Jesus! Solomon! and John the Baptist!-See Hakluyt's Voyages.