network of swampy rivers, which we now know as the delta of the Niger river. But slowly there grew up in England, in Denmark, and in the United States a feeling that there was something wrong in this system which imposed so much misery on beings, who, though in some degree inferior to white men, were yet of the same species, since they could interbreed with us and learn to talk our language. That such feelings must have existed at all times was evident from the desire of good men when dying to grant freedom to their slaves. But the feeling as a national one remained dormant, and was not general in England until the close of the 18th century. Here and there cases of a negro prince being sold into slavery attracted attention and sympathy and caused a searching of consciences among enlightened men. In 1768-72 a great-minded Englishman, Granville Sharp, succeeded by pushing a test case in getting a judicial decision that slavery could not exist in England, and that therefore any slave landing in England became free, and could not be taken back into slavery. In 1787 Wilberforce, Clarkson, and other philanthropists formed themselves into an association to secure the abolition of slavery, and by their exertions in Great Britain a bill was passed in 1807 which did not go to the lengths they desired, but which subjected the slave trade under the British flag to severe disabilities. In 1811 this measure was completed and enforced by another bill declaring the Slave Trade to be a felony punishable by penal servitude. Yet it is doubtful whether, before these acts were passed, the hardships of the slaves transported by sea were so terrible as they became after the restrictions placed on the trade rendered it necessary to carry large numbers of human beings on a single voyage more or less concealed from sight in the hold of the vessel with an utter disregard for sanitary conditions[102]. In these later days, when it was necessary to evade tiresome regulations or to carry on the trade in the face of direct prohibition, the sufferings of the slaves were so appalling that they almost transcend belief. It would seem as though the inhuman traffic had created in Arabs, Negroes and white men a deliberate love of cruelty, amounting often to a neglect of commercial interest; for it would obviously have been more to the interest of the slave raider and the slave trader and transporter that the slaves should be landed at their ultimate destination in good condition—certainly with the least possible loss of life. Yet, as the present writer can testify from what he has himself seen in the eighties and nineties of the last century, a slave gang on its march to the coast was loaded with unnecessarily heavy collars or slave-sticks, with chains and irons that chafed and cut into the