This is the fate to which emancipation would consign the Negro. These
are a few of the selected examples of the horrors of barbarism,
furnished by historians, scientific travelers, and Christian
missionaries, whose testimony, as eye-witnesses, has become history
during the last few hundred years. Meanwhile, the light of
civilization has blazed upon Africa from three quarters of the globe,
even as the rays of the sun have enveloped the globe itself.
Missionaries from Europe and America, from Rome, and London, and New
York, have striven with a zeal and fidelity known only to religious
enthusiasm, incited by mutual emulation, and armed with those terrors
which awe the soul, those allurements which beguile the affections,
and those fascinations which enkindle hope; but they have striven in
vain against the colossal power of barbarism; and to-day, those
heathen orgies which have darkened the annals of the world for four
thousand years, are as sacred, to paganism in Africa, as are the rites
and ceremonies of Christianity in London or in Rome.
Is this no evidence of the unfitness of the African for civilization?
And is it just, in the sight of heaven, to force him from his present
willing position of service to civilization, and consign him to a fate
more terrible than even death itself!