Page:The African Slave Trade (Clark).djvu/45

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SENTIMENTS OF WILLIAM FOX.
41

been fearfully augmented by the slave trade, and in some localities, as we have shown, thriving settlements have been changed into a howling wilderness.

Have we not, as a people, a Christian duty to dismarge to that unfortunate and suffering people? Is it not time that we arouse ourselves to the great work of Christianizing them, and saving coming genrations from the awful calamities that have been suffered in the past?

Let the earnest, stirring words of the devoted missionary, William Fox, that come to us from that benighted land, be sounded through the length and breadth of America.

"Surely, 'the voice of our brother's blood crieth' against us 'from the ground.' Yes, the sands of Africa, saturated with the life's blood of tens of thousands who have been slain in the seizure, cry against us from the ground; the deserts, and the trackless forests, strewed with the skulls and bones of thousands who have sickened and died in the march to the coast, cry against us from the ground; the prison-houses and the slave-barracoons, planted along the skirts of the coast, on the borders of the Atlantic, crammed with hundreds of negroes who have survived the deadly march, promiscuously thrown together, with shackles on their legs, half perished with hunger, — these cry against us from the ground. And now that the black hull of the rakish vessel is approaching the coast, and these prisoners are liberated, — liberated only to be more closely packed on board the slaver, — Oh, what bitter lamentations, what multitude of voices cry out against us! The winds and the waves, the mighty surge on the beach, join in the melancholy chorus; and the scores of negroes, who are often swamped and