there, will ever rise to their full height and grandeur. With all our hopes of, and pride in Hayti, her history shows how sad a schooling she has had! In truth, how could France or Spain train the Negro race to high ideas of liberty and of government, when all their modern history has been an almost hopeless effort, to learn the alphabet of freedom,—to tread the first steps of legal self-restraint? I grant that not unfrequently they present the individual black man, refined, elegant, accomplished, and learned, far beyond any that spring up on American or English soil. But in capacity for free government, and civil order, the British West India Isles, Sierra Leone, the free colored men of America, and our own Republic are, without doubt, far in advance of all the rest of the children of Africa under the sun. Indeed it is only under the influence of Anglo-Saxon principles that the children of Africa, despite their wrongs and injuries, have been able to open their eyes to the full, clear, quiet, heavens, of freedom, far distant, though at times they were!
3. I venture now to call your attention to a few remarks upon the probable destiny of this English language, in this country, and throughout this continent.
And here, as everywhere else on the globe, one cannot but see the most magnificent prospects for this noble language.[1] Its thought, its wisdom, its prac-
- ↑ I quote the following from a learned English journal:—"And as of all the works of man language is the most enduring, and partakes the most of eternity, as our own language, so far as thought can project itself in the future, seems likely to be coeval with the world, and to spread
