organized running away to the
North, and this, with the growing scarcity of suitable land and the moral
revolt, led to the Civil War and the disappearance of the American slave
trade.

There was still, however, the Mohammedan slave trade to deal with, and
this has been the work of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In
the last quarter of the nineteenth century ten thousand slaves annually
were being distributed on the southern and eastern coast of the
Mediterranean and at the great slave market in Bornu.

On the east coast of Africa in 1862 nineteen thousand slaves were passed
into Zanzibar and thence into Arabia and Persia. As late as 1880, three
thousand annually were being thus transplanted, but now the trade is about
stopped. To-day the only centers of actual slave trading may be said to be
the cocoa plantations of the Portuguese Islands on the west coast of
Africa, and the Congo Free State.

Such is the story of the Rape of Ethiopia--a sordid, pitiful, cruel tale.
Raphael painted, Luther preached, Corneille wrote, and Milton sung; and
through it all, for four hundred years, the dark captives wound to the sea
amid the bleaching bones of the dead; for four hundred years the sharks
followed the scurrying ships; for four hundred years America was strewn
with the living and dying millions of a transplanted race; for four
hundred years Ethiopia stretched forth her hands unto God.

FOOTNOTES:

[70] Cf. Helps: _Spanish Conquest_, IV, 401.

[71] Helps, _op. cit._, I, 219-220.

[72] Helps, _op. cit._, II, 18-19.

[73] Helps, _op. cit._, III, 211-212.

[74] Theal: _History and Ethnography of South Africa before 1795_, I, 476.

[75] Ingram: _History of Slavery_, p. 152.

X THE WEST INDIES AND LATIN AMERICA

That was a wonderful century, the fifteenth, when men realized that beyond
the scowling waste of western waters were dreams come true. Curious and
yet crassly human it is that, with all this poetry and romance, arose at
once the filthiest institution of the modern world and the costliest. For
on Negro slavery in America was built, not simply the abortive cotton
kingdom, but the foundations of that modern imperialism which is based on
the despising of backward men.

According to some accounts Alonzo, "the Negro," piloted one of the ships
of Columbus, and certainly there was Negro blood among his sailors. As
early as 1528 there were nearly ten thousand Negroes in the new world. We
hear of th