and the tares grew together in the soil. When the tares began to choke
out the wheat, the uprooting of the foul growth became inevitable.
Perhaps the Civil War was a necessity,--for this reason, the disease of
slavery had struck in upon the vitals of the nation and the only cure
was the surgeon's knife. Therefore God raised up soldiers, and anointed
them as surgeons, with "the ointment of war, black and sulphurous."

By a remarkable coincidence, the year that brought a slave ship to
Jamestown, Virginia, brought the _Mayflower_ and the Pilgrim fathers to
Plymouth Rock. It is a singular fact that the star of hope and the orb
of night rose at one and the same hour upon the horizon. At first the
rich men of London counted the Virginia tobacco a luxury, but the weed
soon became a necessity, and the captain of the African ship exchanged
one slave for ten huge bales of tobacco. A second cargo of slaves
brought even larger dividends to the owners of the slave ship. Soon the
story of the financial returns of the traffic began to inflame the
avarice of England, Spain and Portugal. The slave trade was exalted to
the dignity of commerce in wheat and flour, coal and iron. Just as ships
are now built to carry China's tea and silk, India's indigo and spices,
so ships were built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the
kidnapping of African slaves, and the sale of these men to the sugar and
cotton planters of the West Indies and of America. Even the stories of
the gold and diamond fields of South Africa and Alaska have had less
power to inflame men's minds than the stories of the black men in the
forests of Africa, every one of whom was good for twenty guineas.

The London of 1700 experienced a boom in slave stocks as the London of
1900 in rubber stocks. Merchants and captains, after a few years'
absence, returned to London to buy houses, carriages and gold plate, and
by their political largesses to win the title of baronet, and even seats