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disparaging sentiment. His hands are free from the blood of other men. He has not in any way oppressed other races. has suffered, and that is all. He has been scattered and peeled, despoiled and plundered, abused, persecuted, and downtrodden, and that is all. The late Professor Tayler Lewis, of Union College, when he was once asked the flippant question, "What shall we do with the negro?" replied, " And pray, sir, what shall the negro do with you?. It is my logic, with no disrespect to anybody, that one question is as fair as the other." * The negroes on the African continent who have not read European history are divided into two classes, namely, those who have seen and had intercourse with the Europeans, and those who have never seen but only heard of them. The view taken by the former at this moment is exactly that described by Mungo Park a hundred years ago. A century has made no change. Of the impressions of the latter we have a fair specimen in one of Stanley's amusing anecdotes. Mungo Park says:

Although the negroes in general have a very great idea of the wealth and power of the Europeans, I am afraid that the Mohammedan converts among them think very lightly of our superior attainments in religious knowledge. The white traders in the maritime districts take no pains to counteract this unhappy prejudice. The poor Africans, whom we affect to consider as barbarians, look upon us, I fear, as little better than a race of. formidable but ignorant heathen.†

Mr. Stanley, describing the people on the south-western shores of Lake Tanganyika, says:

The conduct of the first natives to whom we were introduced pleased us all. They showed themselves in a very amiable light, sold their corn cheaply. and without fuss, behaved themselves decently and with propriety, though their principal men, entertaining very strange ideas of white men, carefully concealed themselves from view, and refused to be tempted to expose themselves within view or hearing of us.

Their doubts of our character were reported to us by a friendly young Arab as follows: "Kassanga, chief of Ruanda, says, How can the white men be good when they come for no trade, whose feet one never sees, who always go covered from head to foot with clothes? Do not tell me they are good and friendly. There is something very mysterious about them; perhaps wicked. Probably they are magicians; at any rate, it is better to leave them alone, and to keep close until they are gone.""

* Methodist Quarterly Review, Oct., 1878, p. 617.

Park's Travels.

And again:

In these people we first saw the mild, amiable, unsophisticated innocence of this part of Central Africa, and their behavior was exactly the reverse of the wild, ferocious, cannibalistic races the Arabs had described to us.*

After the disparaging view of the negro taken by Professor Hartranft, it is not surprising that he should have exclaimed:

As to the African, there are not a few Americans, even in this day, who think a righteous solution of the African question is to ship them all off to the Dark Continent. So far as the Amercan Colonization Society keeps in view education and other Christian instrumentalities I bid them God-speed; but if they desire to send the negro out of the country, I say, No! a thousand times, No! Let us solve the problem right here where God has placed them.

We cannot help repeating the last words of the paragraph"right here where God has placed them "—and we think of the sanguinary scenes attending the capture and deportation of their fathers from the ancestral land; the devastation of flourishing districts; the desolation and ruin by fire and sword; the pillage, the plunder, the murders, and the horrors of the middle passage.

There was among philanthropists a difference of opinion when these people, or their fathers, were being shipped to America; and Professor Hartranft is not alone in his benevolent scruples about shipping them back to the "Dark Continent."

The Rev. Sylvanus Heywood, who seems to have a higher appreciation of the race and of its work, speaks of the negro as the "black diamond plucked out of Africa," and advocates for him an education the same in character and completeness as that given to the white man. He says:

You may enact laws and hedge them about with penalties for securing the rights of the blacks, but law alone will prove a fail

But give to them the highest Christian culture, and they will not only demand, but command, their rights. Give them a common school education, and it will be a blessing to them; but with nothing more they will remain but hewers of wood and drawers of water. They will be in society, but not of it. But give them the highest culture among cultured men, and the case will be far different. It is too late in the day to raise the ques

"Through the Dark Continent," vol. ii, pp. 68, 69.

tion whether they are capable of this. This Association has demonstrated that day by day. I have spent ten years as a teacher among the whites and two among the blacks, and I must say that I accomplished more in those two years than in ten-more in the way of giving instruction. I say it is too late to raise that question at all. It is already demonstrated. Let them be educated with broad culture. Let them have the training that will put them in possession of practical skill, such as shall win success. Let them have their own lawyers well trained in legal lore, so that they shall be able-in that natural eloquence in which they excel-to carry conviction to dignified courts. Let them have clergymen, not only earnest and sanctified, but able to cope with the deep things of science and theology-men able to stand before the most learned bodies. Let them have statesmen, wellgrounded in philosophy, history, and government, so that they will be able not only to win victories upon the stump, but in the halls of legislation. Let their homes become homes of Christian culture and social refinement. Then, and not till then, will they cease to struggle for their rights, and take them.

But Mr. Heywood takes also a much broader view of the logical and necessary sequence of all this high culture-of all this effective training. He points to the fatherland. His philosophy is correct. For the negro, pure and simple, this is the only real solution of his difficulties. He says:

The ways of God are mysterious. We must walk by faith, and not by sight. We hear his voice saying, "This is the way; walk ye in it." In this darkness we see his hand. In the raising of this Society and the doing away with slavery we can see almost visibly the hand of God displayed upon the midnight sky, point ing to that Dark Continent, saying we should send these freemen forth as the apostles of light to purify and make glad their ancestral homes.

No man who has any proper conception of the capacities and work of the negro, and has caught any thing like a glimpse of his ultimate destiny, can fail to arrive at Mr. Heywood's conclusion. To the intelligent and earnest negro in America there is, as he rises in culture, an ever-widening horizon of duty and of liberty. Home, or rather the place of his birth, gets too narrow for liberty, too circumscribed for work, and he looks to Africa as the field for both.

In an able article in the London "Times" for May 19, on the negro migration in the United States, the following words occur:

The truth is that the negro is not a migratory being. He did not come of his own accord to Virginia or any other Southern FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXXII.-7

State, nor will he willingly leave it again now that he is acclimatized there. He has found an Africa in the South which is quite as congenial to him as that from which his forefathers were transported.

On the subject of the negro the "Times" and every body else not African are utterly in the dark. An acknowledged mystery hangs about him and his destiny. Foreigners do not know the negro. They have never had an opportunity of knowing him. Foreign slavery on the one hand, and aboriginal barbarism on the other, are the only circumstances under which they have had an opportunity of contemplating him. It is true that the "negro is not a migratory being." He would never have appeared on American soil if he had not been taken thither by violence. And the restlessness he now shows is among the strongest proofs of his freedom. He is now free to think and act for himself, and the consciousness of being a stranger in a strange land is beginning to operate upon him. The "Times" admits that "this is not the first symptom of a desire for change among the colored citizens;" and yet it fancies that the negro has found "an Africa in the South which is quite as congenial to him as that from which his forefathers were transported." The fact is, that the negro is getting every day more and more into a position to show himself no longer a dormant, but an active, factor among the forces of civilization, and the European will witness almost daily new developments in his character-the exhibition of qualities never suspected. Next to ridicule one of the most repulsive things to a sensitive mind is sympathy unduly extended, especially when the sympathizer has no means of correctly estimating the situation which he imagines should call forth his sympathy. There are very few Europeans who are qualified either to guide or to sympathize with the negro in the countries of his exile; and gratuitous advice even from these, in vital questions of his race, has no practical influence upon him.

"The enthusiasm for Liberia" has not died out, as the "Times" imagines. The American Colonization Society has at this moment five hundred thousand applicants for passage to Liberia. Dr. A. L. Stanford, a negro of culture, who was sent last year as Commissioner to Liberia from his people in Arkansas, returned with a favorable report, in which he says:

After traveling extensively in Liberia and observing the pros perous condition of the colony which the American Colonization Society has planted, and, I am convinced, firmly established, I am prepared to lend my aid in disabusing the public mind in regard to the noble efforts put forth by that Society in elevating the downtrodden negro race. I entertain very different views from what I held before. I verily believe that Africa is the natural home of the negro, and that ere long the remnant of her descendants, wherever dispersed, will return to that land. I favor a gradual emigration of the more enterprising, hard-working, and intelligent class of American negroes. I believe such a course would prove a blessing to Africa and to the race.

*

It is admitted by all travelers to the coast that Liberia occupies five hundred miles of the finest and most picturesque portion of West Africa, with an interior extending two hundred miles on indefinitely back, abounding in every thing necessary for the growth and prosperity of a people. The whole valley of the Niger is accessible to this republic, teeming with a population every-where hospitable and friendly, ready and anxious to welcome to their salubrious, prolific, and picturesque home their brethren returning from the countries of their exile.

In the trade and commerce of this country there seems to be a special interest, not only for the negroes in the United States, but for the whole American people. There would be unlimited demand for American productions in that vast region now almost untouched. Gold, and hides, and beeswax, and rubber, as well as the finest coffee, might be had in unlimited quantities. Not far from Liberia are the unvisited but easily accessible and wealthy countries north and west of Ashantee and Dahomey, possessing the very highest capacity for the consumption of manufactured articles and for the production of raw material—from which a prodigious trade, struggling for an outlet, filters through in very small quantities to the Gulf of Benin.

Viewing the subject in this light, it becomes a practical business question whether there are no large capitalists in the Northern or Southern States willing to invest in an entirely virgin country, so much nearer to the United States than many of those countries from which at great expense tropical produc tions are now obtained for the American market-a field where

"African Repository," April, 1879, pp. 40, 41.

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