ich new
land, the wealth of which was to be had in return for ordinary manual
labor. Had the country been conceived of as existing primarily for the
benefit of its actual inhabitants, it might have waited for natural
increase or immigration to supply the needed hands; but both Europe and
the earlier colonists themselves regarded this land as existing chiefly
for the benefit of Europe, and as designed to be exploited, as rapidly
and ruthlessly as possible, of the boundless wealth of its resources.
This was the primary excuse for the rise of the African slave-trade to
America.

Every experiment of such a kind, however, where the moral standard of a
people is lowered for the sake of a material advantage, is dangerous in
just such proportion as that advantage is great. In this case it was
great. For at least a century, in the West Indies and the southern
United States, agriculture flourished, trade increased, and English
manufactures were nourished, in just such proportion as Americans stole
Negroes and worked them to death. This advantage, to be sure, became
much smaller in later times, and at one critical period was, at least in
the Southern States, almost _nil_; but energetic efforts were wanting,
and, before the nation was aware, slavery had seized a new and well-nigh
immovable footing in the Cotton Kingdom.

The colonists averred with perfect truth that they did not commence this
fatal traffic, but that it was imposed upon them from without.
Nevertheless, all too soon did they lay aside scruples against it and
hasten to share its material benefits. Even those who braved the rough
Atlantic for the highest moral motives fell early victims to the
allurements of this system. Thus, throughout colonial history, in spite
of many honest attempts to stop the further pursuit of the slave-trade,
we notice back of nearly all such attempts a certain moral apathy, an
indisposition to attack the evil with the sharp weapons which its nature
demanded. Consequently, there developed steadily, irresistibly, a vast
social problem, which required two centuries and a half for a nation of
trained European stock and boasted moral fibre to solve.

93. ~The Moral Movement.~ For the solution of this problem there were,
roughly speaking, three classes of efforts made during this
time,--moral, political, and economic: that is to say, efforts which
sought directly to raise the moral standard of the nation; efforts which
sought to stop the trade