Sir Richard Francis Burton
Published: 2013-09
Total Pages: 72
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901 edition. Excerpt: ... whose blood is unmixed. This is my definition; but of this point opinions differ. And here we may stand to view the gleam of light which the future casts across the Dark Continent. Slowly but surely the wave of Moslem conquest rolls down towards the line. Every Moslem is a propagandist, and their traders, unlike ours, carry conversion with them. This fact European missionaries deny, because they do not like it: they would rather preach to heathens than to Moslems, whom Locke describes as unorthodox Christians. They even deny the superiority of El Islam, which forbids the pagan abominations of child-murder, human sacrifice, witchburning, ordeal-poisons, and horrors innumerable. But we, who look forward to the advent of a higher law, of a nobler humanity, hail with infinite pleasure every sign of progress. Philanthropists, whose heads are sometimes softer than their hearts, have summed up their opinion of slavery as the " sum of all villainies." I look upon it as an evil, to the slaveholder even more than to the slave, but a necessary evil, or, rather, a condition of things essentially connected, like polygamy, with the progress of human society, especially in the tropics. The savage hunting tribes slave for themselves; they are at the bottom of the ladder. Advancing to agricultural and settled life, man must have assistants, hands, slaves. As population increases, commerce develops itself and free labour fills the markets; the slave and the serf are emancipated: they have done their task; they disappear from the community, never more to return. Hence every nation, Hindu and Hebrew, English and French, have had slaves; all rose to their present state of civilisation by the "sum of all villainies." And here, when owning slavery to be an...