Vermont phÅ“nix. [volume] (Brattleboro, Vt.) 1834-1955, 1880-01-09

SOME INTERESTING AND SUGGESTIVE HISTORICAL
FAcTs FOR THE PRESENT GENERATION.
From the New York Sunday Iimesl

FAcTs FOR THE PRESENT GENERATION
From the New York Sunday Times.l
The announcement on Christmas Day that
n long delayed triumph of Christianity was at
length TO take place, in the destruction of
slavery in the Island of Cuba, must have
struck many minds as very appropriate to
this season of good will" On the LIST of
January, 1850, it is announced, emancipation
will begin by order of the Spanish Govern
ment in their wealthy colony of Cuba, and
on the same day, 1890, it will be completed,
and the last slave in the Spanish possessions
be freed from his shaclles. So closes the
the most melancholy and disgraceful chapter
in the annals of human crime. 1t is more
than four centuries since a certain Portuguese
captain landed (1444 at Lagos a cargo of 235
black slaves. The slavery of white captives
and Mohammedan prisoners was fast dying
out in Europe, but the united discovery of a
new continent needing labor, and of barbar-
Gus coast having slaves, awoke greed and
stimulated cruelty, and created slavery anew.
One of the most benevolent men of any age
has the bad fame of introducing slavery into
this continent. But Las Casas, though he
did this to protect his beloved and oppressed
Indians, lived TO bitterly repent of this great
mistake. On the skirts Of the Roman Catho-
lie church Of the Middle Ages, however, re-
mains the dark and bloody spot of the en-
couragement, if not the introduction, of
slavery in a new world. One slave Chris
tianized was supposed to outweigh all the
heads and blood of thousands sacrificed to cru
city and greed.
Three centuries and half have passed
since the first slaves were introduced (1521)
into the Island of Cuba. And it may safely
be said that of all the human pain and hope
less misery which the sun looks upon year
by year, none ever equaled that history of
agony and injustice which began with the
Spanish importation of slavery into the New
World, and was continued by the English
slave-tra during three hundred years. With
a mockery of their faith which skeptics will
never forget, the Spanish authorities during
two centuries concluded more than ten treat
les I'm the name of the most Holy Trinity"
which authorized the sale of more than j00,-
900 human beings, and received from it a
tax of over fifty million of livres. Nor was
the Roman church alone guilty. Protestant
England was equally criminal with Catholic
Spain. The first ship which sailed from Eng
land in 1862, under Sir John Hawkins, on
the diabolical errand of buying slaves in Af-
rica and selling them in the West Indies,
bore as If in blasphemy, the sacred name of
Jesus. Henceforth, Protestant power
Great Britain-should lead in the most
shameless and cruel traffic which has ever
one continent of human beings to people an
other with slaves For centuries various Eng
lish monarchs encouraged this barbarous
trade bishops and clergy favored it; Parlia-
ment supported it by repeated resolutions
and acts the judges approved it, and even
so distinguished jurist as Lord Eldon had
the audaoity to say (in 1900 in Parliament,
The slave trade has been sanctioned by
Parliament, where sat jurisconsults the most
wise, theologians the most enlightened, states
men the most eminent" By the treaty of
Utrecht Q7O3,) Great Britain secured from
the crown of Spain the monopoly in this in
famous traffic of supplying the New World
with slaves for thirty years And for the
next fifty years English foreign policy CEN
tired itself about this detestable trade. I'm
der the influence of this greed, slavery was
forced upon the American colonies by the
British government, and no less than three
different efforts by the colonies of Virginia
and South Carolina for emancipation were
checked by the British authorities. 1t is
true, however, that afterward these colonies
were only too ready to accept the 'institu-
ton" thus forced upon them.
The present generation in England and the
United States have fortunately never heard
much of the horrors of that trade, which
Great Britain piled industriously for two
centuries and a half. The young student
turns over the writings Of Clarkson and
Sharp and Wilberforce, and is amazed to see
the tortures which SO steadily, for so many
years, were inflicted on so many innocent
human beings merely for the sake of money.
The captives torn from their families the
long rows chained together beneath low
decks, unable even to sit up, the dead and
dying manacled to the living; each morning
the cOrpses thrown TO the fishes the home
sickness ending in insanity Of the unhappy
prisoners; those released even for a mo-
ment plunging into the sea as the least of
evils the walls and groans which rose as a
continual appeal to heaven from the slave
ship on the middle passage"-these are the
scenes revealed to us in the literature of
slavery, and which passed under the British
flag through so many dark years Even so
calm a historian as Bancroft reckons that
during one hundred years before the Declara-
ton of Independence Great Britain trans
ported to the New World one million Of
slaves from Africa, and that, besides these,
tr0 hundred and Jtty thousand had been