Viewing the success awarded to opening up the new country as a development of Divine Providence in relation to the African family, the mind naturally turns to the probable influence it may have on negro slavery, and more especially on the practice of it by a large portion of our own race. We now demand increased supplies of cotton and sugar, and then reprobate the means our American brethren adopt to supply our wants. We claim a right to speak about this evil, and also to act in reference to its removal, the more especially because we are of one blood. It is on the Anglo-American race that the hopes of the world for liberty and progress rest. Now it is very grievous to find one portion of this race practicing the gigantic evil, and the other aiding, by increased demands for the produce of slave labor, in perpetuating the enormous wrong. The Mauritius, a mere speck on the ocean, yields sugar, by means of guano, improved machinery, and free labor, equal in amount to one fourth part of the entire consumption of Great Britain. On that island land is excessively dear and far from rich: no crop can be raised except by means of guano, and labor has to be brought all the way from India. But in Africa the land is cheap, the soil good, and free labor is to be found on the spot. Our chief hopes rest with the natives themselves; and if the point to which I have given prominence, of healthy inland commercial stations, be realized, where all the produce raised may be collected, there is little doubt but that slavery among our kinsmen across the Atlantic will, in the course of some years, cease to assume the form of a necessity to even the slaveholders themselves. Natives alone can collect produce from the more distant hamlets, and bring it to the stations contemplated. This is the system pursued so successfully in Angola. If England had possessed that strip of land, by civilly declining to enrich her "frontier colonists" by "Caffre wars", the inborn energy of English colonists would have developed its resources, and the exports would not have been 100,000 Pounds as now, but one million at least. The establishment of the necessary agency must be a work of time, and greater difficulty will be experienced on the eastern than on the western side of the continent, because in the one region we have a people who know none but slave-traders, while in the other we have tribes who have felt the influence of the coast missionaries and of the great Niger expedition; one invaluable benefit it conferred was the dissemination of the knowledge of English love of commerce and English hatred of slavery, and it therefore was no failure. But on the east there is a river which may become a good pathway to a central population who are friendly to the English; and if we can conciliate the less amicable people on the river, and introduce commerce, an effectual blow will be struck at the slave-trade in that quarter. By linking the Africans there to ourselves in the manner proposed, it is hoped that their elevation will eventually be the result. In this hope and proposed effort I am joined by my brother Charles, who has come from America, after seventeen years' separation, for the purpose. We expect success through the influence of that Spirit who already aided the efforts to open the country, and who has since turned the public mind toward it. A failure may be experienced by sudden rash speculation overstocking the markets there, and raising the prices against ourselves. But I propose to spend some more years of labor, and shall be thankful if I see the system fairly begun in an open pathway which will eventually benefit both Africa and England.
The village of Kilimane stands on a great mud bank, and is surrounded by extensive swamps and rice-grounds. The banks of the river are lined with mangrove bushes, the roots of which, and the slimy banks on which they grow, are alternately exposed to the tide and sun. The houses are well built of brick and lime, the latter from Mozambique. If one digs down two or three feet in any part of the site of the village, he comes to water; hence the walls built on this mud bank gradually subside; pieces are sometimes sawn off the doors below, because the walls in which they are fixed have descended into the ground, so as to leave the floors higher than the bottom of the doors. It is almost needless to say that Kilimane is very unhealthy. A man of plethoric temperament is sure to get fever, and concerning a stout person one may hear the remark, "Ah! he will not live long; he is sure to die."