showing a fiercer and ruder culture, Dahomey and Ashanti. The state of
Dahomey was founded by Tacondomi early in the seventeenth century, and
developed into a fierce and bloody tyranny with wholesale murder. The king
had a body of two thousand to five thousand Amazons renowned for their
bravery and armed with rifles. The kingdom was overthrown by the French in
1892-93. Under Sai Tutu, Ashanti arose to power in the seventeenth
century. A military aristocracy with cruel blood sacrifices was formed. By
1816 the king had at his disposal two hundred thousand soldiers. The
Ashanti power was crushed by the English in the war of 1873-74.

In these states and in later years in Benin the whole character of
west-coast culture seems to change. In place of the Yoruban culture, with
its city democracy, its elevated religious ideas, its finely organized
industry, and its noble art, came Ashanti and Dahomey. What was it that
changed the character of the west coast from this to the orgies of war and
blood sacrifice which we read of later in these lands?

There can be but one answer: the slave trade. Not simply the sale of men,
but an organized traffic of such proportions and widely organized
ramifications as to turn the attention and energies of men from nearly all
other industries, encourage war and all the cruelest passions of war, and
concentrate this traffic in precisely that part of Africa farthest from
the ancient Mediterranean lines of trade.

We need not assume that the cultural change was sudden or absolute.
Ancient Yoruba had the cruelty of a semi-civilized land, but it was not
dominant or tyrannical. Modern Benin and Dahomey showed traces of skill,
culture, and industry along with inexplicable cruelty and
bloodthirstiness. But it was the slave trade that turned the balance and
set these lands backward. Dahomey was the last word in a series of human