On the eastern side of the peninsula of Africa, many thousand slaves are sold to Asia, perfectly in the same manner as those on the west side are sent to the West Indies; but no one, that ever I heard, has as yet opened his mouth against the sale of Africans to the East Indies; and yet there is an aggravation in this last sale of slaves that should touch us much more than the other, where no such additional grievance can be pretended. The slaves sold into Asia are most of them Christians; they are sold to Mahometans, and, with their liberty, they are certainly deprived of their religion like-wise. But the treatment of the Asiatics being much more humane than what the Africans, sold to the West Indies, meet with, no clamour has yet been raised against this commerce in Asia, because its only bad consequence is apostacy; a proof to me that religion has no part in the present dispute, or, as I have said, it is the abuse that accidentally follows the purchasing of slaves, not the trade itself, that should be considered as the grievance.
It is plain from all history, that two abominable practices, the one the eating of men, the other of sacrificing them to the devil, prevailed all over Africa. The India trade, as we have seen in very early ages, first established the buying and selling of slaves; since that time, the eating of men, or sacrificing them, has so greatly decreased on the eastern side of the peninsula, that now we scarcely hear of an instance of either of these that can be properly vouched. On the western part, towards the Atlantic Ocean, where the sale of slaves began a considerable time later, after the discovery of America and the Weft Indies, both of these horrid practices are, as it were, general, though, I am told, less so to the northward since that event.
