Note 140 — Chapter II

One hundred and forty years later, Daniel De Foe, a devoted Christian man, wrote his celebrated biography of Robinson Crusoe, who, when he had been long living in Brazil as a planter, met his critical shipwreck in a voyage to the African coast for slaves. The romance is intended by its author to be what we call a religious novel. The religious experiences of the hero are those to which De Foe attached most importance. In the relation of these experiences he enumerates and repents his “manifold sins and wickedness.” But among these, although he regrets his own folly in risking so much in the pursuit of wealth, it is never intimated that there is anything wrong in dragging these wretched negroes unwilling from their homes: so slow had been the development of the spirit of humanity in the sixteenth and even the seventeenth century, and so ill defined were the rights of man!