This culpable blindness or carelessness on our part is doubtless largely fostered by the comforting and comfortable belief that our missionaries are doing a great and noble work in Africa, and that mere contact with the European and European commerce must of necessity have an elevating effect upon the lower races. The truth is that for every negro nominally or genuinely brought under the influence of Christianity, ten thousand have been driven by drink to depths of moral and physical depravity unheard of among uncontaminated native tribes, and that so far contact with the European and his commerce has resulted not in elevation to the African, but in degradation of the most loathsome kind. To what extent Park was really influenced in his opinions on the slave question by Edwards it would be difficult to say. It matters little, however, for whether he really believed in the righteousness of slavery or was merely reasoned into neutrality, his position was equally indefensible. Nay, more, if, as his friends say, he really believed that the trade was an unjust one, the position he assumed was nothing more nor less than criminal. These urge, as if it were an extenuating circumstance, that in private conversation he even expressed the greatest abhorrence of the traffic. This, it must be confessed, seems improbable. Such an attitude is utterly unlike what we should expect from a man of Park’s marked individuality and strong earnest truthfulness. Moreover, it seems sufficiently clear that the public opinion of his day ascribed to him a belief in the righteousness of the principle of slavery, and if it was wrong, it seems strange that he took no means to correct it. But that it was not wrong seems evident from a speech delivered on the Abolition of the Slave Trade by George Hibbert in Parliament in 1803. The following is an extract--valuable, too, as throwing light upon the share of Edwards in the writing of Park’s book:-- “I have read and heard that we are to look to Park’s facts and not to his opinions; and it has been insinuated that his editor, Mr. Edwards, had foisted those opinions (relating to the slave trade) into his book. It happened to me once to converse with Mr. Park at a meeting of the Linnean Society, when this very topic was started, and he assured me that, not being in the habit of literary composition, he was obliged to employ some one to put his manuscript into a form fit for the public eye, but that every sheet of the publication had undergone his strict revision, and that not only every fact but every sentiment was his own.”