members.  A voyage to the Canaries with fish was commonly prolonged to the west coast of Africa, where slaves were bought with rum.  Thence the vessel would proceed to the West Indies where the slaves would be sold, a large part of the purchase price being taken in molasses, which, in its turn, was distilled into rum at home, to be used for buying more slaves—­for in this traffic little of actual worth was paid for the hapless captives.  Fiery rum, usually adulterated and more than ever poisonous, was all the African chiefs received for their droves of human cattle.  For it they sold wives and children, made bloody war and sold their captives, kidnapped and sold their human booty.

Nothing in the history of our people shows so strikingly the progress of man toward higher ideals, toward a clearer sense of the duties of humanity and the rightful relation of the strong toward the weak, than the changed sentiment concerning the slave trade.  In its most humane form the thought of that traffic to-day fills us with horror.  The stories of its worst phases seem almost incredible, and we wonder that men of American blood could have been such utter brutes.  But two centuries ago the foremost men of New England engaged in the trade or profited by its fruits.  Peter Fanueil, who-built for Boston that historic hall which we call the Cradle of Liberty, and which in later years resounded with the anti-slavery eloquence of Garrison and Phillips, was a slave owner and an actual participant in the trade.  The most “respectable” merchants of Providence and Newport were active slavers—­just as some of the most respectable merchants and manufacturers of to-day make merchandise of white men, women, and children, whose slavery is none the less slavery because they are driven by the fear of starvation instead of the overseer’s lash.  Perhaps two hundred years from now our descendants will see the criminality of our industrial system to-day, as clearly as we see the wrong in that of our forefathers.  The utmost piety was observed in setting out a slave-buying expedition.  The commissions were issued “by the Grace of God,” divine guidance was implored for the captain who was to swap fiery rum for stolen children, and prayers were not infrequently offered for long delayed or missing slavers.  George Dowing, a Massachusetts clergyman, wrote of slavery in Barbadoes:  “I believe they have bought this year no less than a thousand negroes, and the more they buie, the better able they are to buie, for in a year and a half they will earne with God’s blessing, as much as they cost.”  Most of the slaves brought from the coast of Guinea in New England vessels were deported again—­sent to the southern States or to the West Indies for a market.  The climate and the industrial conditions of New England were alike unfavorable to the growth there of slavery, and its ports served chiefly as clearing-houses for the trade.  Yet there was not even among the most enlightened and leading people of the colony any moral