South of the mouth of the Senegal and comprising the whole Guinea coast, Africa is tropical, well watered, and populous. This is the home of the true African Negro. Here, for almost the first time, since the beginning of the Middle Ages, Christian Europe came in contact with a race of ruder culture and different color than its own. This coast was found to be worth exploiting; for it yielded, besides various desirable resinous gums, three articles which have distinguished the exploitation of Africa, namely, gold, ivory, and slaves. Beginning of Negro Slavery in Europe.--At this point begins the horrible and revolting story of European Negro slavery. The ancient world had practiced this ownership of human chattels, and the Roman Empire had declined under a burden of half the population sunk in bondage. To the enormous detriment and suffering of mankind, Mohammed had tolerated the institution, and slavery is permitted by the Koran. But it is the glory of the mediæval church that it abolished human slavery from Christian Europe. However dreary and unjust feudalism may have been, it knew nothing of that institution which degrades men and women to the level of cattle and remorselessly sells the husband from his family, the mother from her child. Slaves in Portugal.--The arrival of the Portuguese upon the coast of Guinea now revived not the bondage of one white man to another, but that of the black to the white. The first slaves carried to Portugal were regarded simply as objects of peculiar interest, captives to represent to the court the population of those shores which had been added to the Portuguese dominion. But southern Portugal, from which the Moors had been expelled, had suffered from a lack of laborers, and it was found profitable to introduce Negroes to work these fields. Arguments to Justify Slavery.--So arose the institution of Negro slavery, which a century later upon the shores of the New World was to develop into so tremendous and terrible a thing. Curiously enough, religion was evoked to justify this enslavement of the Africans. The Church taught that these people, being heathen, were fortunate to be captured by Christians, that they might thereby be brought to baptism and conversion; for it is better for the body to perish than for the soul to be cast into hell. At a later age, when the falsity of this teaching had been realized, men still sought to justify the institution by arguing that the Almighty had created the African of a lower state especially that he might serve the superior race. The coast of Guinea continued to be the resort of slavers down to the middle of the last century, and such scenes of cruelty, wickedness, and debauchery have occurred along its shores as can scarcely be paralleled in brutality in the history of any people.