Under the institution of slavery which curbed the aspirations of the Negro, it was not possible to expect the race to have shown any capacity except for hard labor in the fields which the lash accelerated. In most islands there was nothing else but agriculture fields to be cleared and developed with religion to mitigate and console the workers. The profits which were uppermost in the minds of the masters were gathered regularly and yielded handsomely. The African people have been one of the earliest acquainted with cotton. A careful examination of available historical material shows that while Europe was still dressing in goat skins and grass goods the Negro peoples of Africa had been using cotton goods. Miss Kingsley relates that the cloth loom was invented by natives of the Eboe tribe, but many varieties of looms were common to the people of the Soudan. The prevailing color of the cloth from Guinea is blue and it is distinctly quaint, so enduring and pleasing that it has been handed down from the hoary ages to the present day. The dyes of the natives obtained from vegetable matter and other unknown primitive processes, have always won the admiration of the appreciative world. Europeans have admired the quality and durability of these cloths. The work of African looms in their primitive frames can be seen in the Museums of Natural History in London, Paris, Berlin and New York. They are indeed fine specimens of African handiwork and authorities have said that they would do credit to any Manchester or Birmingham looms. It is said that native cloth manufactured at Kano is not very old and that it probably came from the Songhay country, but according to El Bekri, the Arab historian, and other ancient geographers, the art of weaving was very flourishing on the Upper Nile, especially in the town of Silla from very ancient times and as early as the eleventh century, the cotton cloth was called in this region by the same name it bears to this day, namely, "shigge." The English West Indies exported to Britain during the year 1760 9,535,010 pounds of cotton. By 1787 this amount had increased to 18,716,445 pounds; in 1801 to 42,090,765, and in 1811 it was 41,735,555, according to William Irving, Inspector General of the London Customhouse. It has been stated that just before the war of American independence the slaves in the sugar colonies did not exceed the fortieth part of the inhabitants of the British Empire, yet they contributed in that neglected state perhaps a sixth part of the revenue. The British Isles contained a population of nearly 11,500,000; North America, 2,600,000 with 400,000 slaves, which made 3,000,000; the West Indies 82,000 freemen and 418,000 slaves.