340 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY which it did not encourage alike in slaves and slavers.

It is interesting to observe, from the records of European intercourse with the coast, that the evil of trading in arms and spirits was very early apparent to the intelligent.

Barbot and Bosman both deplore the trade in arms, but the one speaking for the French and English and the other for the Dutch agree in regarding it as inevitable, ** since should one nation abstain from the profit of the trade, other nations would only sell the more." ''Abundance of firearms, gunpowder, and ball," says Barbot, ** are sold by all the trading Europeans, and are a very profitable commodity when the blacks of the coast are at war, yet were it to be wished they had never been carried thither, considering how fatal they have been and will still be upon occasion in the hands of the blacks to Europeans who, for a little gain, furnish them with knives to cut their own throats ; of which each nation is sensible enough, and yet none will forbear to carry that commodity which proves so dangerous in the hands of those blacks. The best excuse we have for this ill-practice is that if one does not sell the other will sell them, if the French do not the Dutch will, and if they should forbear it the English or others would do it." The idea of the delegates of seventeen European nations assembled for the purpose of agreeing to limitations to be placed upon the trade of their respective countries was one which had not presented itself to the eyes of the seventeenth century. The International Conferences of Berlin and Brussels belonged to another age.

The effect of the slave trade upon the coast was felt into the far interior, and in the later records of the Haussa States we hear of slaves being hunted for purposes of sale to the black traders from the south, who in turn sold them to Europeans on the coast. Mungo Park's account of his travels in passing from the Gambia to the Niger at the end of the eighteenth century gives a sufficiently sorrowful picture of the condition of populations which had then been ground for two hundred years between the oppression