SLAVE-RAIDING 411 The raids by means of which slaves are obtained in the hunting grounds of the interior to be despatched upon this journey across the desert, are even more productive of human suffering, more desolating to all that makes up the most primitive conceptions of human happiness. Apart from the enslavement of prisoners of war, which constitutes a separate branch of the same custom, and occurs whenever a successful war gives the opportunity for it, the slave-raid, as a national habit, is still usually directed against natives of a different religion, who are assumed to be of a lower order of humanity. Throughout the West of Africa, at the beginning of the present century, the custom remained among the races bordering northwards upon the desert to raid southwards among the pagans and cannibals for the purpose of filling their slave-rooms, stocking their farms, and increasing their revenues by the surplus which could be disposed of in the market. It was a relatively small surplus only which experienced the pains of the desert journey for purposes of exportation, but though relatively small it was nurnerically great, and the sum of misery inflicted by the slave - hunts of countless generations defies all computation. It is not to be supposed that it was the Christian nor even the Mohammedan who first invented the theory that there is no moral obligation to respect the rights of infidels. Indeed, if modern experience may be trusted, it would seem rather that the less is the grade of difference the more is the sense of distance between the despiser and the despised. The contempt of the superior pagan for the inferior fetish worshipper is just as keen as that of the Christian for the pagan, and from race to race in a descending scale the theory of inferiority has been acted on as a justification of the practice of enslavement. In West Africa, where the superior race preyed directly upon the inferior, the practice has probably been peculiarly demoralising, for there the brutality of the slave-raider was added to the despotism of the slave-