The revolting custom of White Slavery in the Barbary States was, for many years, the shame of modern civilization. The nations of Europe made constant efforts, continued through successive centuries, to procure its _abolition_, and also to rescue their subjects from its fearful doom. These may be traced in the diversified pages of history, and in the authentic memoirs of the times. Literature also affords illustrations, which must not be neglected. At one period, the French, the Italians, and the Spaniards borrowed the plots of their stories mostly from this source.[4] The adventures of Robinson Crusoe make our childhood familiar with one of its forms. Among his early trials, he was piratically captured by a rover from Salle, a port of Morocco, on the Atlantic Ocean, and reduced to slavery. "At this surprising change of circumstances," he says, "from a merchant to a miserable slave, I was perfectly overwhelmed; and now I looked back upon my father's prophetic discourse to me, that I should be miserable, and have none to relieve me, which I thought was so effectually brought to pass, that I could not be worse." And Cervantes, in the story of Don Quixote, over which so many generations have shaken with laughter, turns aside from its genial current to give the narrative of a Spanish captive who had escaped from Algiers. The author is supposed to have drawn from his own experience; for during five years and a half he endured the horrors of Algerine slavery, from which he was finally liberated by a ransom of about six hundred dollars.[5] This inconsiderable sum of money--less than the price of an intelligent African slave in our own Southern States--gave to freedom, to his country, and to mankind the author of Don Quixote. [Footnote 4: Sismondi's Literature of the South of Europe, vol. iii. chap. 29, p. 492.] [Footnote 5: The exact amount is left uncertain both by Smollet and Thomas Roscoe in their lives of Cervantes. It appears that it was five hundred gold crowns of Spain, which, according to his Spanish biographer, Navarrete, is 6770 reals, (_Vida de Cervantes_, p. 371.) The real is supposed to be less than ten cents.] [Illustration]