Such things are of course not taken into account, any more than the original cruelty of the slave merchant, who tears his victims from their homes and their friends. On the banks of the Bosphorus, as on those of the Oxus, few persons care to picture to their minds the horrors of that first moment of separation. How many orphans, how many widows, how many aged and helpless parents, are left behind to wring their hands in sorrow for their bread-winner, who is carried into captivity! It is impossible to count them, it is impossible to describe the miserable condition of so many villages and districts which are exposed to the terrible scourge of the slave trade. The traveller in those regions stumbles at every step over the most melancholy traces of the devastation which it causes. However certain he may feel of the splendid destiny which awaits this or that individual captive, he must still exclaim: "This is the most execrable occupation that has ever defiled the hands of man, and its suppression is the first and holiest duty which our western civilisation has to perform for the cause of humanity!" The suppression of the slave trade in Central Asia is, moreover, much easier than many might at first sight suppose. The root of the evil is to be sought, not so much in the Turkomans as in the inhabitants of the cities. All nomad tribes were and are ready for such a trade, if they only find settled tribes who will buy their captives of them. The Bedouins of the Arabian desert could never addict themselves much to the traffic, inasmuch as the markets of the surrounding cities were closed by the religion of Islam against the sale of their booty. In the same way the Turkomans would soon abandon the practice, if the sale of Persians, Afghans, &c., in the Khanats were declared illegal. The Djemshidis, the Firuzkuhis, and Hezares, afford the strongest proof of this. As the transport of their captives to Bokhara is rendered unsafe by the intermediate Turkoman tribes, while at the same time their sale is forbidden in the Afghan town of Herat, they have either to suppress their slave-trading propensities altogether, or come to a compromise with the Turkomans, much to the advantage of the latter.