along the West African coast. To be
sure there is the acclimatising fever a sort of
bilious remittent fever—which proves fatal on an
average to two or three out of every hundred
American immigrants. But with proper
precautions, such as sleeping the first few nights on
board ship, or, if obliged to remain on shore,
sleeping in a close room with a small fire to
exclude the damp, not eating too much fruit,
and not drinking too much rum, the acclimatising
fever maybe got over as mildly as measles
here with us. Save this bilious remittent—to
be gone through by all new colonisers—Liberia
has no specific maladies in her air; and now
that her forests are clearing and her swamps
draining, is becoming singularly healthy. The
best district of all is Carrysburg, situated twelve
miles east of the White Plains—a hilly country,
bracing and invigorating, and to be the future
Montpellier of the low lands. This talk of the
healthiness of the district is meant only for
blacks—the negro emigrants from America. To
the white Europeans it is still the "grave" which
the west coast has always been.

It has been said in England that the Americo-
Liberians, themselves escaped or manumitted
slaves, hold the natives in the same bondage as
that from which they have been set free; and
the slander has been repeated again and again,
till, as is the case with all slanders well asserted,
it has taken the place of a proved and indubitable
fact. Now, the truth of the matter is
simply this: We all know that slavery is the
African institution. There is not a kingdom,
there is not a tribe, but makes slaves or sells
them. Slavery is their own special form of
human holding—indigenous to the soil, like
cotton or sugar—and they themselves are virtually
the authors of their own wretchedness.
Whenever the Liberians have purchased their
lands and territories from native tribes and
chiefs, they have been able to do so only on
condition that these tribes and chiefs may keep
their "boys," as they call them, on the same
terms as now, and that the new comers will
make no forcible alteration in their peculiar
tenure of domestic slaves. No persuasion has
yet induced these outlying tribes to give up their
''boys," who, however, stand more in the relation
of our own apprentices, or the old Highland
clansmen, or the Roman clients, than as slaves
proper, being, for one thing, always relatives
of the master, in a strange mingling of the
patriarchal and slave-owning systems. But the
Americo-Liberians do not countenance the
system; and any of those slaves or boys escaping
to their own towns and settlements are not given
up. In the constitution, indeed, is this section,
which ought to settle the question at once with
all candid people: "There shall be no slavery
within this republic, nor shall any citizen, or
any person resident therein, deal in slaves either
within or without its bounds, either directly or
indirectly." The system among the aborigines
is daily declining, and in a few years there will
not be seen even this mild form of "boys " or
clansmen to give weight to the rumour that the
"Anglo-Saxon Liberian nationality " maintains
a wrong against which its own very existence is
a protest.

The government of Liberia is a republic
founded on the model of the United States.
There is a president elected for a term of two
years, who must be thirty-five years of age, and
who must be possessed of real property to the
extent of six hundred dollars. The vice-presiden
must also be thirty-five years of age, and possessed
of real property to the extent of six hundred
dollars; for the vice-president often becomes the
president when the two years are out, and must
therefore have all the more important qualifications
for his post. There is a senate, the
members of which must be twenty-five years old,
and to which no state officers are admitted; and
the judicial system is managed by magistrates,
against the decisions of whom appeals may be
carried to the quarterly court, and thence to the
supreme court of the empire. The quarterly
courts are managed by one paid judge and two
assistants, but as yet they have had very little
to do, and common law generally is rather out
of place in a country where criminals are rare
and the prisons empty. There are corporations,
jurymen, counsel, solicitors, just as with any
other civilised people; and they have probate
business, and make wills, and leave their property
to their heirs, all the same as if they had an
Archbishop of Canterbury, and another of York,
and proctors sitting in chambers about Doctors'
Commons. They have a small capitation tax;
and this, with customs dues, &c., makes up the
state revenue. Their political jurisdiction
extends further than their territorial—quite two
hundred miles away into the interior; the native
tribes generally looking on the Americo-
Liberians as their chiefs, and disposed to acknowledge
their superiority, nay, even disposed to
acknowledge a kind of sovereignty, when not
up in arms against them. But in general they
are very troublesome, especially the Sassy Drews:
an undersized, warlike, treacherous tribe,
excessively hostile to foreigners. Fortunately, every
Anglo-Liberian is a volunteer, and having plenty
of arms, they can defend themselves pretty briskly.
They have not made any territorial conquests,
properly so called, therefore have not raised up
any enemies on that account; for they have
purchased and had ceded to them by treaties all
that they have gained—buying up the Shebar
river, for instance, in 1850, and annexing the
San Pedro and all the Maryland country in
1857. By degrees they will get more, especially
as they are in advance of all the natives on the
coast in general civilisation and aptitude for
trade; thus the Gold coast people are idle and
will not work at all; those of Sierra Leone are
only for selling, mere middlemen who produce
nothing, and so on; but the Liberians are
farmers, manufacturers, merchants, indifferently,
and thus have more capacities for success than
any of the others.

The chief produce of Liberia at the present
time is coffee and sugar. Sugar, indeed, is the
best thing yet made; coffee is indigenous, grows