And yet, in spite of all the suffering that it entailed, and in spite of its degrading effect upon the people who engaged in it, we can see, as we look back upon it now, that some good has come out of it. It served, for one thing, to bring a large number of the savage people of Africa into closer contact with the enlightenment and civilization of the Western World. In the end, it aroused in the minds of some of the best people in Europe and America a new interest in Africa and led hundreds of good Christian people to give up the security of their comfortable homes and give their lives to the task of uplifting and educating the neglected races of the Dark Continent.
Among the first and greatest of those who gave their lives for this purpose was the missionary, David Livingstone, who did more than anyone else to arouse the world to the iniquities of the African slave trade.
III
Although, slavery was introduced into Virginia as early as 1619 it was not until nearly one hundred years later that African slaves began to be brought into the English colonies in any very large numbers. For nearly a century the bulk of the rough labor in the field and in the forest was performed, not by Negro slaves, but by white bond servants, who were imported from England and sold like other merchandise in the markets of the colonies.
In 1673, for example, the average price of a bond servant in the colonies, so the historian Bancroft tells us, was ten pounds. At this same time a Negro slave was worth twenty-five pounds.
It was often that the almshouses and prisons of England were emptied in order to furnish laborers for America. It should be remembered, however, that many of the persons who were sent out as bond servants to America were political prisoners, and some of these were persons of quality.
When there was a civil war in England the victorious party frequently disposed of its prisoners by sending them to the colonies as bond servants, or even as slaves. Thousands of Irish Catholics were sent over to America in this way, and it is said that the hardships which these unfortunate bondsmen suffered on the voyage was hardly less than those endured by the African slaves.
It should be remembered, also, in the case of these white bond servants, as in that of the Negro slaves, the sale of human beings began innocently enough. At the time the English colonies were planted in America there was comparatively little free labor anywhere, and especially was this true of farm labor.