Three decades later came that tremendous convulsion in the United States, the like of which the world has not seen. It was resolved by the United States Government to free the slaves, slavery being a system never deliberately adopted by the United States, but inherited, as it were, from the English Colonial _régime_, of which they had by revolution become the successors. The slaveholding Southern States, resisting the new law, sought to withdraw from the Union, and civil war ensued, in which the Abolitionists were entirely successful, but at an appalling cost in men and money. [Sidenote: A Common Error.] It has been necessary to refer thus briefly to the history of slavery because of the strangely prevalent opinion that when peace was restored within the United States, and slavery finally abolished there, slavery no longer existed in the world. True, it was known that there was a sort of domestic service, chiefly of women, akin to slavery, practised in China, Persia, and some minor Oriental countries; but that was thought to be all. It came, therefore, as a rude shock to civilised humanity when travellers of unquestionable veracity, such as Dr. Livingstone, Sir Samuel Baker, and Henry M. Stanley, demonstrated that the slave trade not only still existed throughout vast regions in Africa, but was rampant there in its most atrocious aspect. At first it was hardly realised that the labours of Granville Sharpe, Clarkson, and Wilberforce, the monetary sacrifices of England, and the devastating war in America had, taken together, fallen so far short of complete triumph. But the evidence was overwhelming that such was indeed the case, the Soudan, the Upper Nile, and the basins of the Congo and the great lakes—more than a third of all Africa, exceeding in area the whole of Europe—being still the field of the iniquity. The Sultans of petty states in the Soudan were shown to be, for the most part, chiefs of ferocious Arab tribes who thrived by raiding Central African villages and carrying off their inhabitants, whom they sold for slaves. The cruelties attending their marauding operations were too great to admit of exaggeration. “All over Africa,” wrote Schweinfurth, a German traveller, “dried human skeletons show where the slave-trader has passed.” [Sidenote: A Picture in Words.]