ABSTRACT
First Negroes not Slaves. Slavery was practiced among Negroes in Africa, as well as among Europeans, during the thousand years which followed the fall of Rome. It was also practiced among the Mohammedan peoples of north Africa; their civilizations teemed with white as well as black slaves. The factors causing the swift de cline of slavery in Europe insured its not being reintroduced, after the African west coast had been opened to slavery. The major im pediment to a renewed slave trade in Europe was a vast and sturdy peasant class able to bear the heavy burden of European labor, and unwilling to have its hopes of status and dignity compromised by the presence of a wholly servile class engaged in the same work as its own.
