CHAPTER I.
THE SLAVE TRADE.
The slave trade! Nobody is ignorant of the significance of this word, which should never have found a place in human language.

This abominable traffic, for a long time practised to the profit of the European nations which possessed colonies beyond the sea, has been already forbidden for many years.

Meanwhile it is always going on a large scale, and principally in Central Africa.

Even in this nineteenth century the signature of a few States, calling themselves Christians, are still missing from the Act for the Abolition of Slavery.
We might believe that the trade is no longer carried on; that this buying and this selling of human creatures has ceased: it is not so, and that is what the reader must know if he wishes to become more deeply interested in the second part of this history.

He must learn what these men-hunts actually are still, these hunts which threaten to depopulate a whole continent for the maintenance of a few slave colonies; where and how these barbarous captures are executed; how much blood they cost; how they provoke incendiarism and pillage; finally, for whose profit they are made.
It is in the fifteenth century only that we see the trade in blacks carried on for the first time.