and Portugal. Seconded by admirable missionaries, religion won more souls in these countries, unknown since creation, than Portugal acquired subjects there. The baptism of a queen of Congo was witnessed at Lisbon; and three centuries after, Livingstone found on the coast of Angola and Mozambique the ruins of immense churches built by the Jesuits, the tradition of a monastery of negro Benedictines, and tribes who have handed down from one generation to another the art of reading and writing, which they had acquired from the missionaries.

It is to its conflicts with the Moors that Portugal owes the development of that enterprising, military, and religious genius which raised it so high. But corrupted by contact with the vanquished, it had the misfortune to receive from them a poison destined to endure longer than its victories; it borrowed from them the frightful custom of slavery. The first to give nations to Christianity, it was the first to give it slaves. The port of Lisbon was enriched, the empire of Brazil colonized by the slave-trade, and from all the Portuguese settlements on both coasts of Africa, as from so many convict-prisons, captives in chains were seen to issue for centuries, conducted by force into exile.

The colonial greatness of Portugal is no more; the suppression of the Jesuits by the Marquis de Pombal has destroyed their missions; Christianity has disappeared like commerce; the slave-trade has survived. Suppressed in July, 1842, it still endures in secret. Slavery subsists with it.

The country of Henry the Navigator still possesses settlements in Africa and Asia as so many witnesses of its ancient power; in Africa, the Cape Verde Islands, Portuguese Senegambia or Upper Guinea, and St. Thomas and Prince's Island, with the governments of Angola and Benguela in the Gulf of Guinea on the western coast, and Mozambique on the eastern coast; in Asia, the province of Goa and the government of Macao.

The Cape Verde Islands in 1852 still had 5,659 slaves out of 86,000 inhabitants. The unimportant stations, Bissao, Cacheo, and Zenguichor, which still remind us on the coast of Upper Guinea of the ancient power of Portugal, now despoiled of Arguin and Elmina, serve as the residences, around ill-defended forts and churches in ruins, of a few thousand Europeans or native Christians, served by about 1,500 slaves. Of the four islands in the Gulf of Guinea, two, Fernando Po and Annabona, belong by right to Spain, in fact, to England; two, St. Thomas and Prince's Island, still bear the Portuguese flag; and a garrison of 160 men are exposed there to the rigors of the seasons, divided between wind and rain, to protect the raising of a handful of cocoa and coffee, and a little pepper, ginger, and cinnamon, the cultivation and sale of which employ 12,253 inhabitants, 139 only of whom are whites, 4,580 slaves.

Lower Guinea, commonly called Congo, is as large as France; 660,000 inhabitants live there more or less submissive to the Portuguese administration, in the districts of Angola and Benguela, amidst nearly 2,000,000 independent natives. This territory was and is still in part Christian. Instruction was diffused there by the Jesuits; twelve of their churches still exist; and it is to the Italian Capuchins that we owe the grammar and dictionary of the Binda language. But the same territory was also the greatest centre of the slave-trade, and in its chief town, St. Paul de Loanda, now the seat of a mixed commission charged with passing judgment on the operations of this trade, there might have been seen as lately as 1849 thirty-seven slave-ships at one time awaiting their cargoes under the protection of the same forts which now serve to watch them, and paying a fee for each slave to the government which now condemns them. In 1856 there were still 65,000 slaves under Portuguese dominion.

There were not less than 42,000 out of the 62,000 inhab

itants of the opposite coast of Africa in the government of Mozambique, the last relic of the vast possessions of Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when, master of the coast of Zanguebar and Mascata, it made Melinda a flourishing colony.

The reason of the decay of these vast possessions must not be sought alone in the obstacles which the climate opposes to the health of Europeans; for several points, especially on the eastern coast, are salubrious, watered by running streams, shaded by forests, and peopled by numerous animals, nourished by a fertile soil. Neither is the disproportion between the resources of a small European kingdom and the extent of the settlements a sufficient explanation: what Holland has made of Java is well known. The two scourges of Portuguese Africa have been bad government and the slave-trade; again, it has been slavery that has, above all, corrupted the government. ''By reason of the sale of slaves," says M. Vogel,* "the plantations have been stripped, the laborers frightened away, the native population exasperated, and, by the bait of infamous profits, the provinces made the sink of Portuguese society." Who would be willing to sully his name by placing his capital in enterprises so adventurous and disgraceful? If we say that the negroes labor only on compulsion, we calumniate them, for in this part of Africa,

says M. Vogel again,† "the method of working by agreement with free, paid blacks is that by which the best results have always been obtained."

We have cited elsewhere the letter of Pope Benedict to John, king of Portugal, in which he represents that the treatment practised by Christians towards the wretched slaves inspires them with abhorrence of Christianity.

The same crime, therefore, destroys at once the three instruments of all civilization, religion, labor, and capi

*P. 564, Chap. XXII.

† P. 579, ibid.

tal. Landing, proud of their race and superior civilization, on these distant shores, it was the mission of Christian Europeans to elevate the miserable tribes who dwelt there above polygamy, idolatry, slave-hunts, and the sale of men. Instead of converting, they have imitated them; they have practised slavery, the slave-trade, polygamy; and if they have not been idolaters, if they have not worshipped false gods, it is because they do not worship any. Yet we are astonished that a few poor missionaries, thrown between such believers and such neophytes, have not transformed Africa; and cry out that the negroes oppose Christianity. Yes, when they look at the Christians.

The future prosperity of Portuguese Africa is in evangeli-` zation and agriculture. The abolition of the slave-trade, then of slavery, is the indispensable preliminary of both. This is at length understood. After the slave-trade, slavery is beginning to be attacked.

By a decree of December 14, 1854, and by a statute of June 30, 1856, the slaves belonging to the state, to the municipalities, and to charitable institutions of the Order of Mercy, in all the trans-oceanic possessions, were declared free, on condition of a limited service after their liberation. A statute of July 25, 1856, extends this favor to the slaves belonging to the churches.

A statute of July 5, 1856, abolishes slavery in a part of the province of Angola, namely, in the district of Ambriz and the territories of Cabinda and Melinda. A statute of July 24, 1856, declares free all children born of slave mothers subsequently to this date, on condition of serving the masters of their mothers gratuitously until the age of twenty; the masters remaining charged with their support. The same statute forbids a mother and a child under seven years old to be sold separately.

Two decrees were rendered at the same epoch, declaring

* Revue coloniale, 1858, Vol. XX. p. 385.

all slaves free on touching the soil of Portugal, Madeira, or the Azores.

Lastly, August 25, 1856, upon the declaration of the Governor-General of Macao, Timor, Solor, and Goa, that slavery had disappeared in fact in the Portuguese East Indies, the government gave orders to declare it abolished by law.

No law has yet suppressed slavery in the province of Mozambique, the rest of the province of Angola, Upper Guinea, and the islands of the Gulf of Guinea. It is difficult, moreover, to say whether the laws which M. de Sarda-Bandeira had the honor to countersign have been promulgated and executed on the coast of Africa.

It is evident that, when, at the close of 1857, the Governor-General of Mozambique ordered the arrest by a Portuguese schooner of the French ship Charles et Georges, loaded with free immigrants, condemned the captain to two years in irons, seized the ship and kept the negroes, — it is evident that this scrupulous Governor was the agent of a government whose conversion to the great cause of abolition was recent and still incomplete.

Let us hope that the first Christian country which held slaves after the Middle Ages will not be the last entirely to renounce them. Let us hope that Portugal will avail itself of the settlements which are left it on both coasts of Africa to labor at length to convert and civilize a continent which it has held almost alone in its hands for many centuries, without profit either to this unhappy land, to the mother country, or to humanity.