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Our missionaries echo this wish, and they declare in addition that, alone, armed force can stop the slave traders. “Alas!”, they write to us, “when will there be an European power prepared to destroy this accursed slave trade and all the subsequent evils.

Enough of suffering! Enough of blood! Enough of this infamy! Enough of these insults to civilisation, to all the principles which the Christian world lives by and which it can no longer allow to be trampled under foot! Such is the cry which rises up from every heart. This is what is asked for by God’s Vicar, once again, through my voice.

You will be able to read and you will see for yourselves that nothing is respected by these demons, neither the age, sex, or weakness of their victims; how they strike the women dead at their feet when they resist; how our missionaries are obliged to suffer the anguish of a thousand deaths, not for themselves (they have already made the sacrifice of their lives), but because, witnesses to the miseries of the black population, it is impossible to help them, not wishing to expose them to some new massacre by an unequal resistance; and not being able to pay a ransom for all the slaves.

In the centre of Africa, the price of slaves does not do anything to discourage these practices. In some places, today, many women can be bought for a goat, a child for a packet of salt.