vicinage, with Monrovia for a centre, and you can make a semi-circle, its back circumference the Kong Mountains, its ends touching the coast, of nearly all which the scentific world knows nothing!
I am aware of our slender resources and our thinly-scattered population, and no wise man expects an infant to do a giant's work. But we can do something. Let us systematically, year by year, push more and more into the country, if it be but ten, or even five miles a year; open gradually a highway into the interior;[1] look out the goodly land beyond us, "well watered everywhere as the garden of the Lord,"[2] and appropriate it; press onward a highway for the tribes far back, nigh the mountains, to come unmolested hitherward by open roads; and so by and by we may get large herds of cattle from the interior, and instead of sending some $60,000 or $100,000 out of the Republic for the single article of meats, we may have "our oxen around us strong to labor," and "our sheep may bring forth thousands and tens of thousands in our streets."[3]
- ↑ This subject of roads is one of the most important that can be pondered and acted upon by the people of Liberia. Our independence of the foreign market, the cessation of our biennial and exhausting wars, the promotion of industrial habits among the natives, the opening of larger farms among ourselves, the wide promotion of civilization, and the extension of the gospel in the interior, are all connected with roadmaking. With regard to belligerent natives, no better plan could be adopted than that of obliging them to keep wide roads open wherever they live nigh our settlements; and whenever a war occurs they should be forced, as one of the terms of treaty, to open a road some thirty or forty miles into the heart of their country. Trade would then keep it open, and they cannot fight in an open country.
- ↑ Gen. xiii. 10.
- ↑ Ps. cxliv. 13, 14.
