1 CHAPTER LIX. AFRICA AT THE PRESENT DAY. BY EDWARD EVERETT. 1. AFRICA at the present day is not in that state of utter barbarism which popular opinion ascribes to it. Here, we do not sufficiently discriminate. We judge in the gross. Certainly there are tribes wholly broken down by internal wars and the detestable foreign slave trade; but this is not the character of the entire population. They are not savages. Most of them live by agriculture. There is some traffic between the coast and the interior. Many of the tribes have a respectable architecture, though of a rude kind, but still implying some progress of the arts. Gold dust is collected; iron is smelted and wrought; weapons and utensils of husbandry and household use are fabricated; cloth is woven and dyed; palm-oil is expressed; there are schools; and among the Mohammedan tribes the Koran is read. 2. You, Mr. President, well remember that twenty-one years ago you and I saw, in one of the committee-rooms of yonder Capitol, a native African who had been forty years a field slave in the West Indies and in this country, and wrote at the age of seventy the Arabic character with the fluency and the elegance of a scribe. Why, sir, to give the last test of civilization, Mungo Park tells us in his journal that in the interior of Africa lawsuits are argued with as much ability, as much fluency, and at as much length as in Edinburgh. 3. Sir, I do not wish to run into paradox on this subject. I am aware that the condition of the most advanced tribes of Central Africa is wretched, mainly in consequence of the slave trade. The only wonder is that with this cancer eating into their vitals from age to age, any degree of civilization whatever can exist. But degraded as the ninety millions of Africans are, I presume you might find in the aggregate, on the continent of Europe, another ninety millions as degraded, to which each country in that quarter of the globe would contribute its quota. The dif ference is, and it is certainly an all-important difference, that in Europe, intermingled with these ninety millions, are fifteen or twenty millions possessed of all degrees of culture up to the very highest, while in Africa there is not an individual who, according to our standard, has attained a high degree of intellectual culture; but if obvious causes for this can be shown, it is unphilosophical to infer from it an essential incapacity. 4. But the question seems to me to be put at rest by what we all must have witnessed of what has been achieved by the colored race in this country and on the coast of Africa. Unfavorable as their position has been for any intellectual progress, we still all of us know that they are competent to the common arts and business of life, to the ingenious and mechanical arts, to keeping accounts, to the common branches of academical and professional culture. 5. Paul Cuffee's name is familiar to everybody in my part of the country, and I am sure you have heard of him. He was a man of uncommon energy and force of character. He navigated to Liverpool his own vessel, manned by a colored crew. His father was a native African slave; his mother was a member of one of the broken-down Indian tribes, some fragments of which still linger in the corners of Massachusetts. I must also allude to the extraor dinary attainments of that native African prince, Abdul Rahhahman. If there was ever a native-born gentleman on earth he was one. He had the port and air of a prince, and the literary culture of a scholar. 6. The learned blacksmith of Alabama, now in Liberia, has attained a celebrity scarcely inferior to his white brother who is known by the same designation. When I lived in Cambridge a few years ago, I used to attend, as one of > the Board of Visitors, the examinations of a classical school in which there was a colored boy, the son of a slave in Mississippi, I think. He appeared to me to be of pure African blood. There were at the same time two youths from Georgia, and one of my own sons, attending the same school. I must say that this poor negro boy, Beverly Williams, was one of the best scholars at the school, and in the Latin language he was the best scholar in his class.. These are instances that have fallen under my own obser vation. There are others I am told which show still more conclusively the aptitude of the colored race for every kind of intellectual culture. 7. Now look at what they have done on the coast of Africa. It is only twenty-five or thirty years since that little Colony was founded under the auspices of the American Colonization Society. In that time what have they done; or rather, what have they not done? They have established a well-organized constitution of republican government, which is administered with ability and energy in peace, and by the unfortunate necessity of circumstances, also in war. They have courts of justice, modeled after our own; schools, churches, and lyceums. Commerce is carried on, the soil is tilled, communication is open to the interior. The native tribes are civilized; diplomatic relations are creditably sustained with foreign powers; and the two leading powers of Europe, England and France, have acknowledged their sovereignty and independence. Would the same number of persons taken principally from the laboring classes of any portion of England or AngloAmerica have done better than this? 8. Ah! sir, there is an influence at work through the agency of this Society, and other societies, and through the agency of the Colony of Liberia, and others which I hope will be established, sufficient to produce these and still greater effects. I mean the influence of pure, unselfish Christian love. This, after all, is the only influence that never can fail. Military power will at times be resisted be and overcome. Commercial enterprise, however well planned, may be blasted. State policy, however deep, may outwitted; but pure, unselfish, manly, rather let me say heavenly, love never did, and in the long run never will, fail. It is a truth which this Society ought to write upon its banners, that it is not political nor military power, but the moral sentiment, principally under the guidance and influence of religious zeal, that has in all ages civilized the world. Arms, craft, and mammon lie in wait and watch their chance, but they can not poison its vitality. 9. Whatever becomes of the question of intellectual superiority, I should insult this audience if I attempted to argue that in the moral sentiments the colored race stand upon an equality with us. I read a year or two ago in a newspaper an anecdote which illustrates this in so beautiful and striking a manner that, with your permission, I will repeat it. 10. When the news of the discovery of gold reached us from California, a citizen of the upper part of Louisiana, from the parish of Rapides, for the sake of improving his not prosperous fortunes, started with his servant to get a share, if he could, of the golden harvest. They repaired to the gold regions. They labored together for a while with success. At length the strength of the master failed and he fell dangerously sick. What then was the conduct of the slave in those far-off hills? In a State whose constitution did not recognize slavery, in that newly gathered and not very thoroughly organized state of society, what was his conduct? As his master lay sick with the typhus fever, Priest and Levite came, and looked upon him, and passed by on the other side. The poor slave stood by him, tended him, protected him, by night and by day his sole companion, nurse, and friend. At length the master died. 11. What then was the conduct of the slave in those distant wastes, as he stood by him whom living he had served, but who was now laid low at his feet by the great Emancipator? He dug his decent grave in the golden sands. He brought together the earnings of their joint labor; these he deposited in a place of safety as a sacred trust for his master's family. He then went to work under a Californian sun to earn the wherewithal to pay his passage home. That done, he went back to the banks of the Red River, in Louisiana, and laid down the little store at the feet of his master's widow. 12. Sir, I do not know whether the story is true, I read it in a public journal. The Italians have a proverbial saying of a tale like this, that if it is not true it is well invented. This, sir, is too good to be invented. It is, it must be true. That master and that slave ought to live in marble and in brass, and if it was not presumptuous in a person like me, so soon to pass away and to be forgotten, I would say their memory shall never perish. “Fortunati ambo! si quid mea carmina possint, 13. There is a moral treasure in that incident. It proves the capacity of the colored race to civilize Africa. There is a moral worth in it beyond all the riches of California. If all her gold-all that she has yet yielded to the indomitable industry of the adventurer, and all that she locks from the cupidity of man in the virgin chambers of her snow-clad sierras-were all molten into one vast ingot, it would not, in the sight of Heaven, buy the moral worth of that one incident. CHAPTER LX. NATIVE AFRICANS IN LIBERIA. 1. LIKE the aborigines of our own country, those of Africa are divided into numerous tribes, each tribe having a dialect differing to a greater or less extent from those |