The honesty, energy, and good sense of Mr. Crafts inspired so much respect and confidence in England, that the Quakers and other benevolent people, who wish to do good to Africa, also merchants, who want to open trade with that region, sent him out there with a valuable cargo of goods, in November, 1862. The mission he is performing is very important to the well-being of the world, as you will see by the following explanation. Africa is four thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean from the United States. It is inhabited by numerous tribes of black people, each tribe with a separate government. These tribes vary in degrees of intelligence and civilization; but they are generally of a peaceable and kindly disposition, unless greatly provoked by wrongs from others. Where they are safe from attack they live in little villages of huts, and raise yams, rice, and other grain for food. They weave coarse cloth from cotton, merely by means of sticks stuck in the ground, and in some places they color it with gay patterns. They make very pretty baskets and mats from grasses, and some of the tribes manufacture rude tools of iron and ornaments of gold. But a constant state of warfare has hindered the improvement of the Africans; for men have very little encouragement to build good houses, and make convenient furniture, and plant grain, if enemies are likely to come any night and burn and trample it all to the ground. These continual wars have been largely caused by the slave-trade. Formerly the African chiefs sold men into Slavery only in punishment for some crime they had committed, or to work out a debt they had failed to pay, or because they were prisoners taken in war. These customs were barbarous enough, but they were not so bad as what they were afterward taught to do by nations calling themselves Christians. In various countries of Europe and America there were white people too proud and lazy to work, but desirous to dress in the best and live on the fat of the land. They sent ships out to Africa to bring them negroes, whom they compelled to work without wages, with coarse, scanty food, and scarcely any clothing. They grew rich on the labor of these poor creatures, and spent their own time in drinking, gambling, and horse-racing. Slave-traders, in order to supply them with as many negroes as they wanted, would steal all the men, women, and children they could catch on the coast of Africa; and would buy others from the chiefs, paying them mostly in rum and gunpowder. This made the different tribes very desirous to go to war with each other, in order to take prisoners to sell to the slave-traders; and the more rum they drank, the more full of fight they were. This mean and cruel business has been carried on by white men four hundred years; and all that while African villages have been burned in the night, and harvests trampled, and men, women, and children carried off to hopeless Slavery in distant lands.