Finally in this connection a word regarding the treatment of slave marriages in New England may not be wholly out of place. With respect to the morality of slavery and the slave trade as viewed by the Puritan the record is perfectly clear. He was no better and no worse than his contemporaries. In his eyes the commerce in human chattels, whether red, black, or white,[673] was as legitimate a business as the handling of West India molasses; though like the Spaniard he may sometimes have excused or extolled it as affording a field for missionary work. "The seventeenth century," observes Weeden, "organized the new western countries, and created an immense opportunity for labor. The eighteenth coolly and deliberately set Europe at the task of depopulating whole districts of Africa, and of transporting the captives, by a necessarily brutal, vicious, and horrible traffic, to the new civilizations of America.... New England entered upon this long path of twisted social development--the wanton destruction of barbaric life in the hope of new civilized life, this perversion of the force of the individual barbarian into an opportunity for social mischief--with no more and no less consciousness than prevailed elsewhere at that time. The Winthrops and other Puritan colonists asked and received Indian captives for slaves as freely as any partisan went for loot or plunder."[674] [Footnote 673: On white slaves in New England, and elsewhere in America, see the valuable article of BUTLER, "British Convicts Shipped to American Colonies," _American Historical Review_, II, 12-33.] [Footnote 674: WEEDEN, _Ecc. and Soc. Hist. of New England_, II, 449, 450. _Cf._ his entire discussion of the "African Slave Trade" in New England, _ibid._, 449-72; and BANCROFT, _Hist. of U. S._ (New York, 1888), II, 268-80.]