From the simple calculation and exposé just now made, it must be obvious that the native princes and traders have a strong and direct interest to oppose the abolition of slavery; although as regards the negro population it is equally clear that they have, if possible, a stronger and more direct interest to promote it by every means in their power. It is not my intention to enter into the very wide and comprehensive question growing out of this position, namely, whether the free negro, if independent of his master, could obtain sufficient employment, or, obtaining, would be ready to accept it. The first authorities of the present day, the ablest political economists of this and every other country, have decided that labour should be free; not only as conducive to the increased comforts of the labourer, but as decidedly favourable to the pecuniary interests of the employer and consumer. The African chiefs, like the owners of slaves in other countries, think they have no security for their authority but the maintenance of their people in slavery; and the prejudices of the negroes are such, the custom has been so long continued and by time become so inveterately strong, that no one having pretensions to superiority will perform any of those useful occupations which the best informed in civilised countries so usually attend to. There is in the habit of slavery a something much more difficult of cure than even in the oldest and most stormy passions of educated man: there is within it a debasement not to be found in any other state, and it seems as absolutely to chain men to the mere measure of their length and breadth upon the soil, as if their existence had no other object. The sun seems to roll his orbit without their observance, and the earth to yield its fruits without their gratitude; and yet they exhibit a deep sense of injury, and feel an insatiable thirst for revenge: such opposite feelings all being generated from the unwholesome effluvia of their religion—of which, however, more hereafter. Another and very plausible reason was afforded the chiefs and people of the interior for not wishing our presence in their countries, and for exciting them to jealous and fearful conjectures as to the object of our visits. This was the forcible possession taken by the French of a position on the Foota frontier of the Waallo country, which although no doubt dictated by a laudable desire of improving the condition of those people and giving a stimulus to their commerce, was done in opposition to the wishes of the Foota chiefs and of those of the Moorish tribes of Bracknar and Trarsar, all of whom claimed a right to the place, and to defend which they made war on the King of Waallo, whose permission alone to establish and occupy a post on disputed ground was purchased by the Governor of Senegal.