us: _Voice of Africa_, Vol. I.

[65] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, I, 14-15.

[66] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, I, 272.

[67] Ratzel: _History of Mankind_, II, 313.

[68] Atlanta University Publications, No. 11.

[69] Robert Lowie in the _New Review_, Sept., 1914.

IX THE TRADE IN MEN

Color was never a badge of slavery in the ancient or medieval world, nor
has it been in the modern world outside of Christian states. Homer sings
of a black man, a "reverend herald"

Of visage solemn, sad, but sable hue,
Short, woolly curls, o'erfleeced his bending head,...
Eurybiates, in whose large soul alone,
Ulysses viewed an image of his own.

Greece and Rome had their chief supplies of slaves from Europe and Asia.
Egypt enslaved races of all colors, and if there were more blacks than
others among her slaves, there were also more blacks among her nobles and
Pharaohs, and both facts are explained by her racial origin and
geographical position. The fall of Rome led to a cessation of the slave
trade, but after a long interval came the white slave trade of the
Saracens and Moors, and finally the modern trade in Negroes.

Slavery as it exists universally among primitive people is a system
whereby captives in war are put to tasks about the homes and in the
fields, thus releasing the warriors for systematic fighting and the women
for leisure. Such slavery has been common among all peoples and was
wide-spread in Africa. The relative number of African slaves under these
conditions was small and the labor not hard; they were members of the
family and might and did often rise to high position in the tribe.

Remembering that in the fifteenth century there was no great disparity
between the civilization of Negroland and that of Europe, what made the
striking difference in subsequent development? European civilization, cut
off by physical barriers from further incursions of barbaric races,
settled more and more to systematic industry and to the domination of one
religion; African culture and industries were threatened by powerful
barbarians from the west and central regions of the continent and by the
Moors in the north, and Islam had only partially converted the leading
peoples.

When, therefore, a demand for workmen arose in America, European
exportation was limited by religious ties and economic stability. African
exportation was encouraged not simply by the Christian attitude toward
heathen, but also by