In those days, when the transition from privateering to piracy was easy of accomplishment, the pirate soon became a practised and desperate slaver. There were then no laws to prevent this inhuman traffic. Indeed the nobler Spaniards, who first peopled the tropical portion of the vast American continent and the West India Islands, were of opinion that, in the innocent and docile children of Africa might be found, if kindly treated, servants who would labour without repugnance, and who, while replacing the native Indians, would materially improve their own then wretched condition. The Spanish settlers therefore encouraged the exchange, and, as emigrants from other nations flocked in great numbers to the newly discovered West, the demand for African labour soon became enormous. [Sidenote: Character of its promoters.] When the freebooters of England found it either necessary or expedient to seek elsewhere other opportunities for their lawless and plundering propensities, no employment could have been more agreeable to their habits than that of a slave trade on the coast of Africa, and thus a commerce, which, if it had been conducted from the first by honest men, on a well-defined system of immigration, might have proved of immense benefit to every one connected with it, became, in the hands of worthless adventurers, one of the most depraved and demoralising recorded in history. Good, possibly, in its original intentions, this trade, from its earliest dawn, was made infamous by the desperate class of men engaged in it from its commencement, and it maintained its character for infamy, unredeemed by any civilising influences, even to our own time. A privateer accustomed to plunder would naturally acknowledge no right of opinion on the part of those he captured: a slave was an article to be dealt with like any other article of commerce, and to be disposed of in any market where the highest price could be obtained. The consent of the negro himself to exchange a state of even starvation and misery for one of comparative comfort was an idea which did not enter the brains of those who first developed the trade; nor was it, indeed, ever entertained by their successors. Throughout the whole of three centuries during which it was carried on, no man on either side of the Atlantic seems to have attempted to introduce a legitimate system of immigration between the two great continents. What a blessing it would have been to mankind had some such system been adopted! What myriads of human lives would have been saved, while the rich lands of the Southern States of America and the equally luxuriant islands of the West, over many portions of which rank grass now grows, would have been beehives of industry and homes of peace, prosperity, and plenty. But, established in sin, the African slave trade thus continued, through its long term of existence, a sink of iniquity. [Sidenote: John Hawkins’ daring expedition.]