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 neoessary 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.

agriculture may find unobstructed scope; where so many results, moral, political, and pecuniary, may be at once achieved; and where a Christian nation, with its multifarious agencies for diffusing civilization, may be built up. If American capitalists desired to engage in agriculture, and to produce the far-famed Liberia coffee or any other tropical product, they could themselves select and send out able hands from America for this work, who, while building up a congenial home for themselves and their children, and making "the wilderness and solitary place glad" for their presence, would be also enlarging the wealth of their patrons.

At a banquet given in Paris on the 19th of May, 1879, in commemoration of the abolition of slavery, M. Victor Hugo said: "In the nineteenth century the white man has made the negro a man, and in the twentieth century Europe will make Africa a world."

We admire the epigrammatic form of this sentence, but we venture to disagree with the sentiment it contains. As philosopher and prophet, the great poet is in this instance mistaken. Poetical inspirations do not always suggest sound political lesBut what he said further on in his speech should be carefully pondered by all intelligent negroes every-where. He said:

sons.

The day had come for the vast continent which alone among the five parts of the world had no history to be reformed by Europeans. The Mediterranean was a lake of civilization, and it was the duty of Greece and of Italy, of France and of Spain, the four countries that occupied its northern shores, to recollect that a vast territory lay unredeemed on the opposite coast. England was also worthy to take part in the great work. She, like France, was one of the great free nations of the globe, and, like France, she had begun the colonization and civilization of Africa. The latter held the north and east, the former the south and the west. America had joined in the task, and Italy was ready to do so. This showed the unity of spirit which pervaded the peoples of the world. M. Victor Hugo then described the magnificent scenery, the fertility, and the navigable rivers of Central Africa in eloquent language, and concluded by exhorting the European nations to occupy this land offered to them by God, to build towns, to make roads, to cultivate the earth, to introduce trade and commerce, to preach peace and concord, so that the new continent should not be the scene of strife, but, free from princes and priests, should enjoy the blessings of fraternity.*

* "Daily Telegraph," May 20.

It is really high time that a "unity of spirit should pervade the peoples of the world" for the regeneration of a continent so long despoiled by the unity or consent of these same peoples. Thinking negroes should ask themselves what part they will take in this magnificent work, the work of reclaiming a continent-their own continent. In what way will they illustrate their participation in the "unity of spirit" which pervades the peoples for the redemption of their fatherland? Compared to this, most of the questions with which they are endeavoring to grapple in the United States sink into insignificance. The local can bear no comparison to the universal, nor the temporary to the eternal.

Victor Hugo exhorts the European nations to "occupy this land offered to them by God." He has forgotten the prudent advice of Cæsar to the ancestors of those nations against invading Africa. The Europeans can hold the domain “offered to them" by only a precarious tenure. But it already belongs to the exiled negro. It is his by creation and inheritance. Every man, woman, and child of the negro race out of Africa ought to thank God for this glorious heritage, and hasten to possess it: a field for the physical, moral, and spiritual development of the negro, where he will live under the influence of his freshest inspirations; where, with the simple shield of faith in God and in his race, and with the sword of the spirit of progress, he will grow and thrive; where, with his sympathetie heart, he will catch stray, far-off tones, inaudible to the foreigner, which, penetrating through the local air, will waken chords in his nature now unknown to the world and unsuspected even by himself. He will come under the influence of powers which will haunt him with strange visions and indicate the Emerson says:

way he should go.

A man's genius, the quality that differences him from every other, the susceptibility to one class of influences, the selection of what is fit for him, the rejection of what is unfit, determines for him the character of the universe. A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him wherever he goes. He takes only his own out of the multiplicity that sweeps and circles round him. He is like one of those booms which are set out from the shore on rivers to catch drift-wood, or like the loadstone among splinters of steel. ... A few anecdotes, a few traits of character, manners, face,

a few incidents, have an emphasis in your memory out of all proportion to their apparent significance, if you measure them by the ordinary standards. They relate to your gift. Let them have their weight, and do not reject them and cast about for illustration and facts more useful to literature. What your heart thinks great is great. The soul's emphasis is always right.*

When Professor Hartranft says, "Let us solve the negro problem right here," in America, what "problem" does he refer to? And how does he propose to solve the great questions of the African race in the United States? There are certain problems at times set before a people by accidental and temporary circumstances; these may admit of solution by extraneous help. There are others which grow out of their natural, inherent, and unchangeable relation to the outside world or the universe; these are to be solved by the people themselves under favoring circumstances; the trusts and responsibilities which these impose are special, incommunicable, and inalienable. But probably Professor Hartranft means the problem pressing upon the white man in his relations to the negro; the problem of his duty toward the "despised" race-his power to arrive at a satisfactory solution being a "test" of his civilization. In regard to this, of course, we can suggest nothing. But from all we can gather it appears that the chief problem held up to the negro for his solution by his friends in America is that of "conquering the caste prejudices of the whites" around him; of becoming, as the usual phrase is, “a man among men,” (white men ;) of "wiping out the color line," etc. Now, we beg most respectfully, with all the earnestness and deference becoming the subject, and with the serious emphasis which we know the enlightened of the race would authorize us to employ, to assure our white friends that these are matters for which the negro, pure and simple, when cultivated up to Mr. Heywood's standard, will care very little. He will then feel that in his own race-groove and on his own continent he has a work to accomplish equal to that of the European, and that caste or race prejudices are as natural to him as to the white man. The passion for equality does not always exert an elevating influence on the character, but may be positively mischievous, where to produce or sustain it certain sentiments in the mind are flat

*The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. i, p. 292.