They had chiefs, or kings; and these kings exercised, despotically, the power of life and death over their ignorant subjects. They had conjurers and witch doctors, and it was one of the time-honored customs that the witch doctors should “smell out,” for death, the wretched creatures whom the king wanted to kill, or whom the witch doctors themselves wished to put out of the way. Thousands upon thousands of years ago, negro warriors sold their negro captives into slavery. Negro husbands would offer their wives and daughters to foreign travelers. Negro fathers would sell their children. In some of the oldest monumental inscriptions of the human race, the negro appears as the chained slave of foreign masters. Anybody on earth who wanted to buy him could do it. His king was ready to sell him; his father was ready to sell him. The Egyptian, the Greek, the Roman owned black slaves as far back as the records go; and the historian Gibbon did no more than express the universal experience and opinion of the ages when he wrote that the negro was a distinctly inferior race. [Illustration: “His normal state was that of warfare against some other black tribe.”] Of all the negroes that have ever lived Tchaka was the greatest. He ruled in Africa, in the eighteenth century. He was a man of immense natural power. His ambition was boundless, his soul untroubled by fear or scruple. Absolute master of a strong tribe, he hurled it against other tribes, one after another, until he had conquered and devastated an imperial territory. In his march to dominion, it is estimated that he caused the slaughter of a million human beings, all of whom were his brothers in black. But he never built a city; never put a ship on the sea; never made two blades of grass grow where one had grown before. He founded no institutions of any kind. He was densely ignorant and superstitious himself, and he had no conception of anything higher or better. To kill, to conquer, to feast, to indulge bestial lust, to inspire terror, to exploit and mercilessly abuse the abject servility of the negroes over whom he ruled were his “pleasures of living.” It was believed that he caused the death of his own mother; it is _known_ that when he buried her he buried fourteen young negro girls with her—_buried them alive_! It is _known_ that, during the “period of mourning” which followed, he caused the death of some thousands of maddened and helpless negroes. It is also known that his sisters got his brothers to assassinate him. Then one of these brothers murdered the other, and so became king of that happy land.