Note 11 — Chapter I

“Without slaves,” says Koeler (Notizen über Bonny), “the fertile tropical valleys would be unproductive and deserted, as white men cannot labour there in the open air.” The question is, whether the world has been sufficiently cleared to enable men to dispense with forced labour? At Fernando Po, the hire of a Kruman, who does about one-fifth of an Englishman’s work, amounts, all things included, to thirty shillings a week. The expression in the text is not too strong. Mr. Lee, Professor of Agricultural Chemistry in the University of Georgia, estimates the manual requirements of the Southern States at one million of men for twenty years, and regards it as “providential that there should be so much unemployed power in human muscles in Western Africa.”