REV. T. L. SHIPMAN (ordained 1826.) JERSEY CITY, CONN. * * * * * THREE EXTRACTS. From a paper read by MR. J. H. ALLEY, of Boston, before the Essex South Conference. The writer testifies, from his own observations, as to The Africans in Africa. The African, in his native land, is little known by us; but a year among that people gave me opportunities for observation. They are far from being the stupid race we so often hear them called. Keen at a bargain, they are often a match for some of us in that boasted Yankee trait. Apt to learn, quick to understand and to appreciate advantages, they are a people easy to assume and appropriate the best results of civilization—brave in the defense of their rights and homes, yet not aggressive, except when forced by circumstances and their teachings. We forget the whole history of this people in looking only at some particular phase or trait. Their land, the field of the slave-stealer for centuries, has been the scene of cruelty, fraud, and all the worst forms of vice. A people educated by so long a course of schooling in its vicissitudes might well be cruel and vicious. The land has been hunted, from Egypt to the Cape of Good Hope, by foreign and native stealers. Tribes have been driven for self-protection, or by greed of gain, to make captures from other tribes or other parts of their own. To show the debasing power of slavery and slave-hunting, let me say that I have seen slaves brought to the coast from the central parts of Africa who were the most abject specimens of the human race I have ever known—brought by a strong, stalwart tribe, noble in bearing, and brave in war; and these, too, were the same tribe or people only a comparatively short time before. Why this great difference? A simple explanation is only required to show it all. Together and at peace, they had a generous and varied diet of animal and vegetable food, for they had extent of territory in which to hunt and gather; but divided and at war, fighting for self-protection, one party gained the supremacy. Then the other were a defeated people; circumscribed within small limits, unable to hunt, they were soon confined to a vegetable diet alone, and then to a single kind, and often to a few simple roots; courage gone, they were reduced to servitude and slavery, and brought to a market. This is no new theory, for the same effects have followed the same causes over and over again. After references to the evils of slavery in this land, and the good to be accomplished by it under the Divine overruling, follows this Thrilling Incident.