assail Messrs. Horace Greeley and Gerrit Smith for pointing out this peculiarity of character in our people. But without doubt they tell the truth of us. We are not "given to change." The death of a master, the break-up of a family, may cast a few black men from the farm to the city, but they go no further. We lack speculation. Man has been called a creature,
"Looking before and after"———
But not so we. We look where we stand, and but few beyond.
So here, on this side of the water. The colonization ship brings a few hundred freed men to this west coast of Africa. They gather together in the city of Monrovia, or the town of Greenville, and there they sit, yea, and would sit forever, if it were not for some strong external influence which now and then scatters a few, and a precious few, here and there along the coast.
Here then you see, in this same people, on both sides of the waters, an exaggeration of the "home feeling," which is so exceedingly opposite to Anglo-Saxon influences that I wonder that we, who have been trained for centuries under them, have not ere this outgrown it. Sixteen years from the settlement of Plymouth, sixty families started from Boston and cut their way to Windsor, on the Connecticut.[1] We in Liberia have never yet had a spontaneous movement of old settlers in a body and with a purpose to a new location. The colored people of Rochester, N.Y., in 1853, I hear, were mostly fugitive slaves. The
- ↑ Bancroft's History of America, ch. ix.
