SLAVE EAZZIAS. 207 the fatigue, the heavy burdens, the cruel kurbatch, have been dwelt upon in all their sickening details often, so that I will not pander to the taste of those who delight in such harrowing accounts by describing them again. The fact is enough; the slave razzias still continue, hundreds of human beings are still being torn from their homes ; and to those who say that negroes do not care, that they are destitute of natural feeling, and without domestic affection, I can simply reply, they are utterly mistaken. Without doubt tribes differ, both in degrees of intelligence and in keenness of feeling ; and in some districts (especially those where the slave-dealers have been for some time established) the natives seem to have lost what natural feeling they once possessed; but, on the other hand, I know innumerable instances where the affection of parents for their children, and natives for their homes, is as strong as that of any Englishman.

Each year the miseries of the captured must increase. On account of the number of women who have been taken to lead low, depraved, animal lives in the harems of the wealthy, the population is fast decreasing. Consequently the expeditions in search 'of victims must proceed farther and farther into the interior, and longer distances have to be traversed on the return journey. The slave-dealers become more and more brutal, and, as time rolls on, are more and more callous to the