CARRYING OFF A WOMAN IN AUSTRALIA ] If among the aborigines a man is too poor to buy a wife, he generally tries to steal one. But as he must not do so within his own clan, as he would trespass upon the property rights of his fellow-men, nothing remains but to kidnap a girl of some neighboring tribe. So he lurks around the villages till some day a girl, while gathering berries or edible roots, unfortunately happens to come too near his hiding place. In this case the manner of his proposal is sudden, but effective. A blow with his war club makes the damsel unconscious, whereupon he drags her to some secure place. Here he keeps her till she has recovered her senses and is able to follow him to his lodge. George Gray, who has written about the natives of Australia, states that the life of young and attractive women among those tribes is a continuous chain of capture by different men, terrible wounds and long wanderings to unknown bands. In addition, such unfortunate females must suffer very often extremely bad treatment by other women, to whom they are brought as prisoners by their capturers. But women have been kidnapped not merely for sexual reasons, but also for their ability to work. Herewith we open the darkest chapter in woman’s history: Slavery, a word which has not lost its terrible meaning for women up to the present day. Slavery has been practiced in all parts of the world in some form. But Africa was the continent where it prevailed from time immemorial to the greatest extent and assumed the most cruel forms. Phœnicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Englishmen and Americans sailed to its coasts, to capture men as well as women and children, to sell and use them for slaves. It is impossible for human imagination to conceive the horrors and misery, caused here by heartless pirates for thousands of years. Imagine a peaceful village, approached stealthily in the night by cruel enemies, who surround it and then set fire to the huts. As the inhabitants rush out in terror, those who resist capture are killed, and those who have escaped the blessing of immediate death are fettered and marched off. Imagine long columns of such unfortunate and often severely wounded men, women and children chained together and driven by ruthless brutes through pathless jungles and arid deserts, to far away markets. No matter how hot the sun burns down, they must move on. Woe to those who break down! They are left where they have dropped, to perish of hunger and thirst, or to be torn by wild beasts. Or, as a warning to the others, they are butchered in cold blood by their drivers. For those who reach their destination, where they are traded like cattle, an existence is waiting that will have fewer moments of joy than there are oases in an endless desert.