known, is not tlic speech of our ancestors. We are here a motley group, composed, without doubt, of persons of almost every tribe in West Africa, from Goree to the Congo. Here are descendants of Jalofs, Fulahs, Mandingoes, Sussus, Timmanees, Veys, Congos; with a large intermixture, everywhere, of Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, Irish, French, and Spanish blood—a slight mingling of the Malayan, and a dash, every now and then, of American Indian. And, perhaps, I would not exaggerate much, if I ended the enumeration of our heterogeneous elements in the words of St. Luke—"Jews and Proselytes, Cretes and Arabians."
And yet they all speak in a foreign tongue, in accents alien from the utterance of their fathers. Our very speech is indicative of sorrowful history; the language we use tells of subjection and of conquest. No people lose entirely their native tongue without the bitter trial of hopeless struggles, bloody strife, heart-breaking despair, agony, and death! Even so we. But this, be it remembered, is a common incident in history, pertaining to almost every nation on earth. Examine all the old histories of men—the histories of Egypt, China, Greece, Rome, and England; and in every case, as in ours, their language reveals the fact of conquest and subjection. But this fact of humiliation seems to have been one of those ordinances of Providence, designed as a means for the introduction of new ideas into the language of a people; or to serve, as the transitional step from low degradation to a higher and nobler civilization.
2. And this remark suggests, in the second place,
