The next steps, also furthered by the British Government, sought to abolish the legal status of slavery and to suppress slave markets and slave dhows. The Western world began to awaken to a sense of duty. In all directions the noble initiative taken by Great Britain found earnest agency. The Christian nations, now thoroughly aroused to the iniquity of the slave trade, exchanged treaties in 1841, the operation of which was designed to clear the ocean of slave transports. When shut out of the American market, it was believed that the infamous slave traffic would subside. But the scourge continued almost unabated. Driven out of the West, it flourished the more in the East, where large markets still remained open. The northern and eastern coasts of Africa continued to supply the Oriental markets, the Soudan, Upper Nile, and Congo Basin being the slave-hunter’s Elysium. The Sultans of the Soudan, whose avarice knew no limit, strove in the cruellest manner to increase their spoil in this man-hunting chase. Khartoum slavers pressed into the Bhar-el-Ghazal, while the Arabs from Zanzibar devastated the Manyema and Tanganyika regions. West-coast raiders had even penetrated as far inland as the Upper Kassai, and created that wretched condition of native life in the interior of the Congo Basin which impressed Livingstone, Stanley, Kirk, Bartle Frere, Nachtigal, Wissmann, Serpa Pinto, Massaia, and that great exemplar of Christianising work, Cardinal Lavigerie. In 1876, nearly ten years before the Berlin Conference, the King of the Belgians called upon Europe to join in a concerted movement to suppress the slave traffic in Central Africa. In the same year the British Government published its _Report of the Royal Commission on Fugitive Slaves_. The words of Prince Bismarck at the Berlin Conference of 1885 were an intimation of the legislation which was thereafter effected by clauses 6 and 9 of the General Act. By clause 6, the Powers agreed “to watch over the preservation of the native tribes and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being, and to help in suppressing slavery and especially the slave trade.” Baron Lambermont stated the distinction between slavery and the slave trade: “The slave trade,” said the Baron, “has another character; it is the very denial of every law, of all social order. Man-hunting constitutes a crime of high treason against humanity. It ought to be repressed wherever it can be reached, on land as well as by sea.”