government, when the laws of human government have clashed with it? Do not multitudes regard the sentiment of a "higher law" as a jest? an "overruling Providence as an obsolete idea?
The traffic is conducted with so much secrecy, and such vigilance is exercised to escape detection, that it is difficult to obtain full evidence of its extent in this country. Still, there is proof enough to show that it is carried on in Cuba and Brazil to an alarming degree, and that American citizens are guilty of participating in it.
The state of the trade at the present time may be learned from Harper's Cyclopaedia of Commerce, published in New York, in 1858, — a reliable authority. Under the article "Slave Trade,"[1] the following statement is made:
"Passing over the interval from the period when the slave trade was declared to be piracy, to the year 1840, we find the number introduced into Brazil from that year to 1851, inclusive, was 348,609, or a little more than 30,000 a year. During the same period, the number imported into Cuba amounted to an average of about 6,000 a year As perhaps not more than three fourths of the whole number was reported to the mixed commission, the yearly average for this period, (for both countries,) may be set down at 45,000 The slave trade is now mainly, if not wholly, carried on with Cuba, which imports about 20,000 slaves every year; which added to the total of the trade with both Brazil and Cuba, since the year 1850, gives the
- ↑ Page 1728.
