The slave, on the other hand, has lost by not being exported. It is the same in the Oil rivers of West Africa, where in 1838 Sir T. Fowell Buxton proposed to substitute for illegal and injurious, harmless and profitable trade leading to ‘Christianity, which would call forth the capabilities of the soul, and elevate the savage mind.’ It was expected that at Benin, for instance, man would become too valuable as a labourer to be sold as a chattel. Unhappily the reverse took place; man became so cheap, that to work and to starve him to death paid better than to feed him. A fresh gang could be purchased for a few shillings, and the price of provisions was of far more importance than the value of life. The Buxtonian idea was founded upon simple ignorance of Africa, and upon the ill-judged assertion that slavery was caused by foreigners. The internal wars, whose main object is capturing serviles, are the normal state of Blackland society; they continued and they will continue, whether slavers touch the coast or not. Briefly, the results to the captive are now not sale, but slaughter or sacrifice in the interior, and death by starvation upon the coast. When I visited Zanzibar, in 1857, the English public, periodically stimulated by the Liberal press, had split up, on the subject of the African slave trade, into two sets of opinions, both honestly believed in, both diametrically opposed to each other, and both somewhat in extremes. The one sanguinely represented it as crushed, and congratulated the nation upon having dealt its death-blow to a system which was rotting the roots of prosperity and progress. The others despondently declared that, although in some places the snake was scotched, yet that it was nowhere killed; they proved that whilst slavery had increased in horrors, the result of our interference, yet the average quantity of the wretched merchandise had not been diminished; they opined that nothing save the special interposition of Providence could end that which had so long baffled many best efforts; and being well acquainted with details, they maintained that the average opinion was a mere pandering to popularity at the expense of truth. And, when weary of the self-glorifying theme whose novelty had engrossed the attention of their fathers, the public readily attributed selfish motives to those who would enliven their zeal.