Ten years later, the abolition of the legal status of slavery in India freed 9,000,000 of slaves. Then, little by little, the nations implicated in slavery gravitated to the side of the emancipators. In 1846 the Bey of Tunis, through British influence, decreed that all slaves touching his territory should become free. The French Republic in 1848 declared by a brief act that no more slaves should be admitted into French territory. In 1861 the autocrat of Russia decreed the emancipation of 20,000,000 serfs. The history of the great struggle in the United States is too recent for it to be forgotten that it occasioned the proclamation of freedom on January 1, 1863, by which 6,000,000 of slaves were admitted to the rights of freemen. Finally, and only four years ago, Brazil, after long and laborious efforts of her most enlightened men, heard that the law of abolition of slavery had passed through her Senate--and thus the cruel and inhuman system of man holding fellow-man as a chattel and barterable property was extinguished throughout all America. It therefore required eighty-two years to extirpate slavery within lands professing to be civilized. Africa in the mean time was not neglected. Her burdens and pains were gradually but surely being reduced. The cruising squadrons sailing up and down the eastern and western coasts made it extremely difficult for slave-ships to break through the close blockade, and after the introduction of steam it was rendered impossible. Education had also greatly spread, and it became a universal conviction that slave-trading was as wicked as piracy.