with the negro gentleman. M. Leconte tells
us that he travelled with a gentleman of high
standing, who had been endeavouring to
place at college, in a western state, a youth
full of talent and intelligence, with a clear
skin, yet with some flaw of colour in his
mother's ancestry. A pupil who knew of
this flaw, denounced the new comer, and it
was found to be necessary to carry him to
France, where he would be allowed to receive
a college education unmolested.

Everywhere met by this spirit; taken from
a half-barbarous condition and educated by
the whites, for their own purposes, down into
the ways of brutes instead of up into the
feelings of developed men; with no high
purpose in life ever set before them; with no
higher motive of existence than the fattening
of their white masters; insulted (if they only
knew it) by a lurking contumely even in the
kindest accents; the great mass of the negro
population has become infected with the
universal feeling, and has fallen so low as to
accept and share the prejudice against itself.
A negro woman in America will, in most
cases, prefer dishonourable union with a
white man to marriage with a black. Negroes
learn to reproach each other for the colour of
the skin, and to look up to the white man
who rules them, with the same affection that
a dog feels for the master to whose hand
it has become accustomed. This prejudice
against the negro in the free states of America
powerfully aids in the support of the slave
system in the south. A certain rich man,
dying in Kentucky, left among his legacies
freedom to each one of his slaves. Further,
to assure their future peaceable enjoyment
of the gift, he enjoined his executor to purchase
in Ohio, a free state, enough land to yield
allotments for them all, on which they might
build dwellings and farm offices; there was
to be provided, also, for them all, a stock,
sufficient to begin with, of agricultural tools,
seeds, and cattle. The conditions of the
bequest were all duly fulfilled, the land was
bought and parcelled out, the stock was
purchased, and the executor set out with his
party of freedom to instal them in their
new homes, and put them in possession of
their rights as citizens. When they came
to the river Ohio, however, they found
arrayed on the other bank the white
population of the district, armed to the teeth,
maintaining that they would not suffer "a
vile colony of niggers" to be settled in the
rnidst of them.

The slave population, thus pressed down
below the level of humanity, has its spirit
broken by the pressure. Uncle Toms
and George Harrises are the exception, not the
rule. Debased by education under a
demoralising system, which acts as a blight on
every wholesome growth in the slave's mind;
the victim of a daily robbery—the robbery of
his right to the labour of his own limbs; it
is a mockery to ask the negro to be honest;
theft and falsehood are begotten out of the
slave system, as surely as stench rises out of
filth. Degraded as they are, the negroes are
still tender-hearted; they identify themselves
with a master's interest; it is wonderful that
they should not have fallen lower than they
have fallen;—fallen they are, however; we
know what we express in England by the
word servility, we know how our hearts burn
at the imputation of a slavish submission even
to the highest power on earth. The slaves
of America—speaking of them as a body—
have, by a long course of depressing treatment,
been made slavish in their spirit. We have
already seen how few of them seek freedom
in flight. We may note further, that while
the treatment of negroes, when they are free
and living in the free states of America, is
such as no man with his spirit whole could
bear, the negroes bear it. A home is open
in Liberia to all free negroes who will accept
citizenship there; on his arrival in Liberia,
the negro receives an allotment of land, and
is supported in a republic of his own race for
the few months that must elapse before the
produce of his farm will feed him. Beyond
the subsistence to which he is entitled, he may
buy land to what extent he pleases; he may
walk over the soil of his own African republic,
encountering no look of reproach, and may
help in spreading the light of civilisation
among his race. The best hopes of a man it
is in the power of every free negro to realise,
by quitting the soil on which he meets with
daily insult, and establishing a true home in
Liberia. He does not, however, feel the daily
insult; he is acclimatised to the atmosphere
of wrong. At the last census there were
found to be four hundred and twenty-eight
thousand, six hundred and thirty-seven free
negroes in the United States; while the
negro population of Liberia, proceeding from
America, has not yet reached ten thousand
souls. Yet thirty years have now elapsed
since, in obedience to high-minded councils,
the black colony was established, and the
town of Monrovia founded on Cape Mesurado.
And it is twenty years since the Maryland
State Colonisation Society planted the allied
colony of Maryland in Liberia.

The negroes in Liberia consist of the few
men whose energies resisted all the depressing
force to which they had been subject in
America, and of their children who have
grown up under better rule. Small as their
number is, the energy with which they have
conducted their affairs, and the influence they
have exerted on surrounding tribes, are
undeniable. The colony has fought with many
difficulties, and its promoters have been
disappointed by the want of interest with
which it is regarded by great numbers of the
class for whose advantage it was planned.
In 1847, in consequence of objection that had
been made on the part of England to imposts
levied upon British vessels in Liberia, and
the assertion that such rights of levying duties