The advantages enjoyed in this day, by the great success which has attended the art of printing--an art for which we are indebted to the genius of a former age--would no doubt afford us a satisfactory history of the rise and progress of public opinion on such a subject, if it were to occur in this age. The state of the art at that period, the proscription of the press, and especially the new and unsettled condition of the colonies, furnishes good cause for the deficiency. We may not, therefore, account for public opinion as satisfactorily now, as might have been done at that time. Still we have abundant materials for a charitable construction of the conduct of our forefathers--both here and in England. The savage, and indeed the brutal condition of the larger portion of Africa, had long since been a matter of history. All well-informed men were familiar with the facts of African history. They were not only Pagans, but Pagans of the most stupid and enslaved kind--without the knowledge of God, or the rudest forms of civilization. The population was divided into tribes, each governed by an ignorant petty king, who ruled his equally Pagan subjects as absolute slaves. In the place of the knowledge and worship of the true God, which was found to exist among the savages of America, the African worships the devil--the evil spirit, and that by the most humiliating and debasing rites of superstition. His superstitions furnished frequent occasions for wars. These wars were highly sanguinary--often exterminating, as all wars amongst an ignorant and highly superstitious people have always been. To spare the life of an enemy in war, make him a prisoner, guard him as such, or make him labor as a slave for his support, is an advance of civilization. To continue to put the enemy to death to the end of the war, is the necessary condition of a state of war in uncivilized life. Such was the known condition of all the African population south of Egypt and the States of Barbary. Did not their condition appeal, as it still does, to the benevolence of the civilized world? But what could they do? Send Christian missionaries? No. We, in this country, have succeeded, to some extent at least, in civilizing the savage tribes upon our border! But the Indians were not, like the Africans, idolatrous Pagans. Be this as it may, the competency of missionary enterprise to civilize and christianize Pagans, was, as it still is to any very material extent, an untried experiment. The opinion then obtained, and to this hour it is not wholly invalidated, that to reduce Pagans to a state of labor was, among other agencies, a necessary condition of their civilization. What then could Christians do in that age for African civilization? They could not introduce them as laborers in England, or on the continent of Europe. Such a step would have denied bread to the multitudes who already filled the menial offices of society. It was impracticable to do this, and inhuman to attempt it.