gular abnegation of civilized happiness in a
slaver's career. We may not be surprised, that such an _animal_ as Da
Souza, who is portrayed in these pages, should revel in the
sensualities of Dahomey; but we must wonder at the passive endurance
that could chain a superior order of man, like Don Pedro Blanco, for
fifteen unbroken years, to his pestilential hermitage, till the
avaricious anchorite went forth from the marshes of Gallinas, laden
with gold. I do not think this story is likely to seduce or educate a
race of slavers!

The frankness of Canot's disclosures may surprise the more reserved
and timid classes of society; but I am of opinion that there is an
ethnographic value in the account of his visit to the Mandingoes and
Fullahs, and especially in his narrative of the wars, jugglery,
cruelty, superstition, and crime, by which one sixth of Africa
subjects the remaining five sixths to servitude.

As the reader peruses these characteristic anecdotes, he will ask
himself how,--in the progress of mankind,--such a people is to be
approached and dealt with? Will the Mahometanism of the North which is
winning its way southward, and infusing itself among the crowds of
central Africa, so as, in some degree, to modify their barbarism,
prepare the primitive tribes to receive a civilization and faith which
are as true as they are divine? Will our colonial fringe spread its
fibres from the coast to the interior, and, like veins of refreshing
blood, pour new currents into the mummy's heart? Is there hope for a
nation which, in three thousand years, has hardly turned in its sleep?
The identical types of race, servitude, occupation, and character that
are now extant in Africa, may be found on the Egyptian monuments built
forty centuries ago; while a Latin poem, attributed to Virgil,
describes a menial negress who might unquestionably pass for a slave
of our Southern plantations:

"Interdum clamat Cybalen; erat unica custos;
Afra genus, tota patriam testante figura;
Torta comam, labroque tumens, et fusca colorem;
Pectore lata, jacens mammis, compressior alvo,
Cruribus exilis, spatiosa prodiga planta;
Continuis rimis calcanea scissa rigebant."[1]

It will be seen from these hints that our memoir has nothing to do
with slavery as a North American institution, except so far as it is
an inheritance from the system it describes; yet, in proportion as the
details exhibit an innate or acquired inferiority of