England, to-day, with all her philanthropy, sends, under the cross of St. George, to convenient magazines of _lawful commerce_ on the coast, her Birmingham muskets, Manchester cottons, and Liverpool lead, all of which are righteously swapped at Sierra Leone, Acra, and on the Gold coast, for Spanish or Brazilian bills on London. Yet, what British merchant does not know the traffic on which those bills are founded, and for whose support his wares are purchased? France, with her _bonnet rouge_ and fraternity, dispatches her Rouen cottons, Marseilles brandies, flimsy taffetas, and indescribable variety of tinsel gewgaws. Philosophic Germany demands a slice for her looking-glasses and beads; while multitudes of our own worthy traders, who would hang a slaver as a pirate _when caught_, do not hesitate to supply him indirectly with tobacco, powder, cotton, Yankee rum, and New England notions, in order to bait the trap in which he _may_ be caught! It is the temptation of these things, I repeat, that feeds the slave-making wars of Africa, and forms the human basis of those admirable bills of exchange. I did not intend to write a homily on Ethiopian commerce when I begun this chapter; but, on reviewing the substantial motives of the traffic, I could not escape a statement which tells its own tale, and is as unquestionable as the facts of verified history. Such, then, may be said to be the _predominating_ influence that supports the African slave-trade; yet, if commerce of all kinds were forbidden with that continent, the customs and laws of the natives would still encourage slavery as a domestic affair, though, of course, in a very modified degree. The rancorous family quarrels among tribes and parts of tribes, will always promote conflicts that resemble the forays of our feudal ancestors, while the captives made therein will invariably become serfs. Besides this, the financial genius of Africa, instead of devising bank notes or the precious metals as a circulating medium, has from time immemorial, declared that a human creature,--_the true representative and embodiment of labor_,--is the most valuable article on earth. A man, therefore, becomes the standard of prices. A slave is a note of hand, that may be discounted or pawned; he is a bill of exchange that carries himself to his destination and pays a debt bodily; he is a tax that walks corporeally into the chieftain's treasury. Thus, slavery is not likely to be surrendered by the negroes themselves as a national institution. Their social interests will continue to maintain hereditary bondage; they will send the felon and the captive to foreign _barracoons_; and they will sentence to domestic servitude the orphans of culprits, disorderly children, gamblers, witches, vagrants, cripples, insolvents, the deaf, the mute, the barren, and the faithless. Five-sixths of the population is in chains.[3]