In no instance has this been verified
more than in the case of the Slave Trade. Never was our national
character more tarnished, and our prosperity more clouded by guilt.
Never was there a monster more difficult to subdue. Even they, who heard
as it were the shrieks of oppression, and wished to assist the
sufferers, were fearful of joining in their behalf. While they
acknowledged the necessity of removing one evil, they were terrified by
the prospect of introducing another; and were, therefore, only able to
relieve their feelings by, lamenting, in the bitterness of their hearts,
that this traffic had ever been begun at all.
After the death of Cardinal Ximenes, the emperor Charles the Fifth, who
had come into power, encouraged the Slave Trade. In 1517, he granted a
patent to one of his Flemish favourites, containing an exclusive right
of importing four thousand Africans into America. But he lived long
enough to repent of what he had thus inconsiderately done; for in the
year 1542, he made a code of laws for the better protection of the
unfortunate Indians in his foreign dominions, and he stopped the
progress of African slavery by an order that all slaves in his American
islands should he made free.
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