gled into the South. Georgia in 1817 ordered that such slaves should be taken from the importers, and sold at auction for the benefit of the State treasury, but allowed the Colonization Society to take them to Africa, provided it reimbursed the State for its expenses in recovering them from their illegal owners. Congress did not interfere with those who had been brought into the States, but provided that all who were captured on the high seas should be carried back to Africa. The first emigrants, therefore, were not Americans, nor even those who could speak the English language, but native Africans returned to their own shores. Three hundred were thus sent back in 1820, while only eighty-eight manumitted or free Americans accompanied them. President Monroe had been so active and earnest in this matter that the chief town was called by his name. His zeal, as one can see from the secret resolution of 1801, was far more political than philanthropic. It was to relieve the slave States of a dangerous class more than to build up an America on African shores. This desire was affected by the general feeling of the age that the ocean slavetrade must be extinguished, though in the last year of the last century over one hundred thousand of these victims had been borne across the ocean.

It should be said that these recaptured and returned Africans have been among the best Liberian citizens. They did not abide in slavery long enough to become weakened by its power. They have proved themselves among the most industrious and energetic of the colonists.

In 1820, then, the American colony of eighty-eight persons landed on the shores of Africa. They were long looking for a habitation. They did not get a permanent foothold until 1822, the jealousy of the English and the natives preventing earlier success. January 7, 1822, they found their Plymouth Rock on a small island at Cape Mesurado, a few rods from the shore. April 25 they effected a permanent lodgement on the continent. Even then the enterprise was on the But for one man it would have been. had walked the beach from Sherbro to Mesurado, a distance of nearly two hundred miles, carrying his babe in his arms, became the Elder Brewster of the Pilgrims. The agents of the society were tired out. They wished to give up the undertaking. The few colonists

point of being abandoned. Rev. Elijah Johnson, who

chose rather to return to the evils that they had known than to endure those upon them and before them there. But this minister declared he would not retreat. "I have been two years searching for a home in Africa," he said. "I have found it. I shall stay here." No wonder that a marble monument to his memory stands in the grounds of the only public building owned and occupied by the Republic in the capital; the only marble monument yet erected by the citizens of the Republic to any of her settlers or sons.

Not less significant and prophetic was his act and word when the captain of a British man-of-war offered to protect him from the natives if he would cede a few feet of ground on Cape Mesurado to that government, where they might simply erect a flag. Much as he needed their help to overcome the enemy thronging upon them, his American instincts caught the full significance of the request, and he promptly declined, saying, "It would cost more to pull down that flag than it will to whip the natives!"

In August of that year Ashmun arrived, the most energetic of all the governors of the colony. In November they had their first battle with the natives, — eight hundred against thirty-five. In December their second, twice the number of assailants against less than the first number of defenders. In each case the handful conquered and the contest for that portion of the land ceased from that hour.

This is the story of the planting of America in Africa. It has been repeated in multitudinous shapes, till it is as well known and well worn as the story of the Pilgrims. The accession of new lands, the retirement of the Colonization Society from the management of affairs, because the European traders would not recognize their government, the erection of a republic, the administration thereof, have been put before our public in so many forms that no one is ignorant of the main facts. Even their presidents are as well known to us as our own, and Roberts is as familiar a name to Americans as Washington, with whom the Liberians like to compare him. There are, however, points upon which less is known. The American public has been compelled, the last two decades, to turn its attention to the Afric-American in its own land. It has been compelled to wrestle with the problem of emancipation, a vastly greater theme than that of colonization. It has been compelled to settle that problem on the field of wasting war. It has been compelled to consider the problems that have arisen out of that settle

ment, the permanency of the Union, enfranchisement, civil rights, education, and other duties of an imperatively national obligation It is far from having exhausted these obligations. Can it, ought it, to look across the seas and be kindly affectioned towards a colony planted more than half a century ago, in contempt and weakness immeasurable: planted by captured natives and by expatriated slaves, who had been crushed by local laws, so that neither writing nor reading, nor handicrafts, except in rare instances, nor self-reliance, nor experience in political or any other matters, had been enjoyed by any of them?

Look at the colony after the lapse of this half-century, and see if it has attained in any direction to the stature of manhood; see if America in Africa has any value to America in America. We shall leave out of consideration its religious and educational condition, since the scope of our purpose will not allow of that examination. The commercial and political condition and relations of Liberia will occupy our attention.

We ought, first of all, not to expect a very great showing. What was any English colony in America fifty years after its settlement? In 1670 Massachusetts had hardly penetrated beyond the seaboard. In 1675, more than fifty years after her Pilgrims landed at their Cape Mesurado, King Philip planned the destruction of the colony and wellnigh executed his purpose. He destroyed many villages and ravaged the frontier settlements, which only extended about twenty miles west of Boston. A few towns on the Connecticut had been planted, as they have to-day on the St. Paul's River, the Connecticut of Liberia. But the country a dozen miles back from the coast was practically a wilderness inhabited by savages.

Equally unsettled were New York and Virginia in 1660 and 1670. The little colonies were dependent entirely on the home government for protection and even for preservation. It took a hundred years more before they were strong enough to stand alone and to resist Indian and French attacks, and even these were not repelled without the aid of troops from the motherland. Let not then Liberia be lightly esteemed if at the end of fifty years she is no farther advanced than Plymouth and Connecticut and Virginia were in the same lapse of time. If she is equal to these she is superior; for if with her far inferior advantages she has attained an equal condition, she is entitled to the greater honor.

GILBERT HAVEN.

ART. X.-CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE.

1.- Die treulose Witwe, eine chinesische Novelle, und ihre Wanderung durch die Weltliteratur. Von EDUARD GRISEBACH. Dritte, umgearbeitete Auflage. Stuttgart: A. Kröner. 1877. 16mo. pp. 128.

"THE Faithless Widow"-the heroine of the very ancient Chinese tale which gives the text for Herr Grisebach's learned little monograph was named Tiän-sche, and was a daughter of the princely house of Tiän. When she had grown into a beautiful young woman, whose face was "of the color of a milk-white icicle," there came travelling through her father's country a very learned scholar and philosopher named Tschwang-söng, who had laid aside all desire for worldly honors and was in search of Tao, the great Wisdom. Attracted by the fame of this esteemed and holy man, Tiän-sche's father gave her to him in marriage; and although the philosophic Tschwang-söng had separated himself from the things of the world forever, he was overcome by the maiden's charms, gave up for a time his search after the Tao, and established himself with his new wife in the province of Sung, in the retired region of the Nanchwa hills. Now, Tschwang-söng had been unfortunate in two previous marital experiences, and this fact had made him somewhat cynical, apparently, and had given to his numerous maxims and quotations from the Chinese classics a direction unfavorable to the female sex. Shortly after his marriage with Tiän-sche, he chanced upon an incident which confirmed these views. As he was walking one day among the hills he came upon a group of graves, and while he indulged in some of the reflections which never failed to fill his contemplative mind, he became aware that one of the graves was new, and that beside it sat a woman, fanning it. This action appeared so singular that even the, philosopher was forced to smile, as he asked its reason; and his cynical soul was not less amused to learn that this was the grave of the woman's husband, to whom she had given a solemn promise that she would not marry again. until the earth over his body should have grown dry. It was for this end, she explained with considerable naïveté, that she was fanning the fresh mound.

Now, Tschwang-söng was a man of great practical benevolence, and one to whom his holiness and wisdom gave such power that he was occasionally capable of something like a miracle. Taking the fan from the woman's hand, therefore, he passed it once or twice across the grave,

and, behold! the earth was dry. Then the woman was very grateful, and would have given him her silver hair-pin; but the philosopher refused it; and, accepting only the fan which he had used, he made his contemplative way homeward, and related the whole story to Tiän-sche his wife, not without some sarcastic comments which roused that lady to a warm display of feeling. "There were few women in the world,” she opined, "ás heartless as this one"; and as for herself, she asserted, it was not a question whether she would wait two years, or five, or many, after her lord and master's death: she never would marry again, and evenher dreams should never be of another than Tschwang-söng.

That philosopher held his peace; but at the end of a few days he suddenly grew ill and died, accompanying his last breath with the unamiable remark that his wife might now regret that she had broken the fan he had brought home with him, for now she had nothing left to fan his grave withal. But Tiän-sche broke out into loud wailing when he died, and tore her hair, and put on mourning and sat down beside his coffin and refused to be comforted. Many guests came to comfort her and pay their respect to the dead man; and among others on the ninth day there arrived a young prince of the neighborhood, "incomparably beautiful, with lips as though they had been colored with a dragon's blood." Alas for poor Tiän-sche! It was not long before her husband's most cynical beliefs were justified; first the young prince and the widow mourned together; then they talked together; briefly, at the end of a few days, they were deeply in love, and had agreed to marry. The prince objected that it would never do to marry in their mourning garments; Tiän-sche agreed, and dressed herself in splendor. The prince objected that no marriage could have good luck that had been contracted when a coffin was in the house; Tiän-sche conceded this, and employed men to move her late husband's body to an old ruined shed. Finally all was ready for the marriage ceremony, when, as he entered the room, the beautiful young prince fell in a fit upon the threshold; and his old servant wrung his hands, and declared that the prince had had such fits before; that he had feared them, and that only one method of cure existed. Hurriedly Tiän-sche demanded what this was; it was, said the servant, part of the brain of a living man or one not yet forty days dead.

Tiän-sche's ingenuity was equal to the emergency. Taking an axe, and going out alone, she approached the side of Tschwang-söng's coffin, and burst it open with many blows. To her horror, its inmate opened his eyes, sat up, and thanked her audibly. Overcome as she was, she stammered out that she had opened the coffin because she had been thinking of stories of those whose souls sometimes returned to them