Abominable as the slave trade has been in filling Tropical Africa with incessant warfare and rapine, it has added much to our knowledge of that continent, and has furnished the excuse or cause of European intervention in many cases, resulting sometimes in a vastly improved condition of the natives when European rule has taken the place of that of Negro or Arab sultans. Its ravages will soon be repaired by a few decades of peace and security during which this prolific, unextinguishable negro race will rapidly increase its numbers. Yet about the African slave trade, as with most other instinctive human procedure, and the movements of one race against another, there is an underlying sense of justice. The White and Yellow peoples have been the unconscious agents of the Power behind Nature in punishing the negro for his lazy backwardness. In this world Natural Law ordains that all mankind must work to a reasonable extent, must wrest from its environment sustenance for body and mind, and a bit over to start the children from a higher level than the parents. The races that will not work persistently and doggedly are trampled on, and in time displaced, by those who do. Let the Negro take this to heart; let him devote his fine muscular development in the first place to the setting of his own rank, untidy continent in order. If he will _not_ work of his own free will, now that freedom of action is temporarily restored to him; if he will not till and manure and drain and irrigate the soil of his country in a steady, laborious way as do the Oriental and the European; if he will not apply himself zealously under European tuition to the development of the vast resources of Tropical Africa, where hitherto he has in many of his tribes led a wasteful unproductive life; then force of circumstances, the pressure of eager, hungry, impatient, outside humanity, the converging energies of Europe and Asia will once more relegate the Negro to a servitude which will be the alternative—in the continued struggle for existence—to extinction. The Negro in some parts of Africa has been given back his freedom that he may use it with a man’s sense of responsibility for the waste of time and opportunities. In not a few European “colonies” or protectorates in Africa the over-ruling white man, or more often the irresponsible trader, planter, prospector and labour recruiter, stills looks upon the Negro race as a people doomed to perpetual serfage. But this mental outlook is fast being modified—under British influence, mainly—into an honest appreciation of native rights to land and produce.