SLAVE-RAIDING 409 how the slave trade of Europe was conducted on the coast.

Slave trade carried on upon an extensive scale involved the practice of slave-raiding as necessarily as the export of gold involved in West Africa the practice of alluvial gold-mining. From the earliest times it had been the custom, as we have seen, not only of Haussaland, but of all the countries of the Western Soudan, to raid the territories of the cannibal pagans to the south regularly once a year for slaves, and when war offered occasion for further profitable captures, whole armies were sometimes enslaved.

To the cannibal, whose practice it was to kill and eat his prisoners, slavery presented itself in the light of a merciful fate, and it was so considered by the conqueror. The view of the Mohammedan or of the higher class pagan with regard to the practice of raiding for slaves, would seem to have been almost identical with that of the Spaniards and Portuguese at the time of the discovery of the East and West Indies. Inferior races of a different faith did not count in the ranks of free human beings. They were little better than cattle, and as such might be hunted and taken without any derogation from the laws of humanity. The difference between the humane man and the cruel man lay not in the practice of or the abstinence from slaving, but in the manner in which slaves were treated ; and in general the slaves of Negroland would seem to have been governed with tolerant good-humour. Their sufferings were not directly intentional, but were incidental to the barbarities of the slave-raid, by which whole villages were destroyed, and to the horrors of transit on foot across the desert.

Were it not that human remains are destructible, the caravan route from Tripoli to Haussaland would be paved deep with human bones. Here is a description, given by Major Denham in 1822, of the condition of that road less than a hundred years ago. He mentions a well within half a mile of Mesbroo. " Round