I read the wonderful tales of travellers about the country, or the first letters of enthusiastic settlers. Liberia is a young country, hardly yet "in the gristle," laying, as I dare to affirm, good foundations; but with much pain, great trials, consuming anxieties, and with the price of great tribulation, and much mortality. But is not this the history of all young countries? Has not God married pain, and suffering, and death to the fresh beginnings of all new nationalities? Would it not be marvellous, not to say miraculous, if it were true, that the history of this colony—for it is nothing more than a colony as yet—that it had been exempted from these trials? And what right have we to expect that God in these days will work miracles, especially for black men?[1]
I have never been disappointed in any thing moral, social, or political that I have met with in this land. I came to the country expecting all the peculiarities of struggling colonial life, with the added phase of imported habits, tinctured with the deterioration, the indifference, the unthriftiness, which are gendered by any servile system. "All work is badly done by people in despair," says Pliny, the naturalist.[2] A forty days' passage through the deep sea cannot effect
- ↑ "No new country can be founded unless under the greatest difficulties. It is the universal law of experience, that however in the late stages of their existence colonies may be prosperous, and to what state soever they may have advanced in the accumulation of wealth, their infant life must always be a life of difficulty and peril."—Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone, Speech before Propagation Soc., Liverpool, 1858.
- ↑ Lord Bacon discourses most pertinently and powerfully to the same effect. See Art. 33 of "Plantations" "Bacon's Essays and Wisdom of the Ancients." I regret I cannot copy it here.
