To be sure, we, with the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors and our minds filled with a horror which their teachings instilled, sometimes think that they were slow to awaken to the enormity of some evils they tolerated.

So perhaps our grandchildren may wonder that we endured, and even defended, present-day conditions, which to them will appear indefensible.

And so looking back on the long continuance of the slave-trade, we wonder that it could have made so pertinacious a fight for life.

We marvel, too, at the character of some of the men engaged in it in its earlier and more lawful days, forgetting that their minds had not been opened, that they regarded the negro as we regard a beeve.

If in some future super-refined state men should come to abstain from all animal food, perhaps the history of the Chicago stock-yards will be as appalling as is that of the Bight of Benin to-day, and that the name of Armour should be given to a great industrial school will seem as curious as to us it is inexplicable that the founder of Fanueil Hall should have dealt in human flesh.
It is, however, a chapter in the story of the American merchant sailor upon which none will wish to linger, and yet which can not be ignored.