From the year when Vasco de Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope (1497) to the year 1807, when the British government prohibited the exportation of slaves over the high seas, is a period of 310 years. During all this time Africa was surrendered to the cruelty of the slave-hunter, and the avarice of the slave-trader. While its people were thus subject to capture and expatriation, it was clearly impossible that any intellectual or moral progress could be made by them. The greater number of those accessible from the coast were compelled to study the best methods of avoiding the slaver and escaping his force and his wiles--the rest only thought of the arts of kidnapping their innocent and unsuspecting fellow-creatures. Yet ridiculous as it may appear to us, there were not wanting zealous men who devoted themselves to Christianizing the savages who were moved by such an opposite spirit. In Angola, Congo, and Mozambique, and far up the Zambezi, missionaries erected churches and cathedrals, appointed bishops and priests, who converted and baptized, while at the mouths of the Niger, the Congo, and the Zambezi their countrymen built slave-barracoons and anchored their murderous slave-ships. European governments legalized and sanctioned the slave trade, the public conscience of the period approved it, the mitred heads of the Church blessed the slave-gangs as they marched to the shore, and the tax-collector received the levy per head as lawful revenue. But here and there during these guilty centuries words of warning are not wanting. Queen Elizabeth, upon being informed of the forcible capture of Africans for the purposes of sale, exclaims solemnly that “such actions are detestable, and will call down vengeance on the perpetrators.” When Las Casas, in his anxiety to save his Indians, suggests that Africans be substituted for them, the Pope, Leo X., declares that “not only the Christian religion but Nature herself cried out against such a course.” One hundred and sixty-five years after the discovery of the Cape, Sir John Hawkins pioneers the way for England to participate in the slave trade, hitherto carried on by the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the Dutch. A century later a king of England, Charles II., heads an English company which undertakes to supply the British West Indies yearly with 30,000 negroes. After the Asiento Contract, under which for thirty years England secured the monopoly of supplying the Spanish West Indies with slaves, as many as 192 ships were engaged every year in the transportation of slaves from the African coast. The countries which suffered most from the superior British method of slave capturing and trading and slave-carrying were Congo land, the Niger Valley, the Guinea and Gold coasts, the Gambia, Cross, and Calabar lands.