greatness of an undertaking is measured by its duration and capacity for expansion.

17. So far as we can now see, Liberia may endure. It has the elements of constancy. It stands acknowledged by many great nations as a nationality. England is pledged by Jamaica and by Sierra Leone to protect it. France is bound by the memories of St. Domingo to protect it. Our nation will defend if she does not acknowledge Liberia.

18. If Liberia shall endure, it is capable of indefinite expansion. Every step in its organization and construction can be repeated, and repeated more easily than it was begun. A voice from large portions of this country announces voluntary emancipation; a voice in this hall announces compensation to masters, and a voice from the free African people of these States will announce a voluntary exodus to the land which nature adapted them to occupy at their return from captivity in our frosty climate.

19. Each new traveler penetrating from the coast to the eastward reports hills and valleys and streams of water where the maps had laid down a desert. The colonist will follow the traveler. A highway shall be there. The people shall press onward to the sources of the Nile; and Egypt shall at last acknowledge a civilization from the West.

20. Let the stable nationality of Liberia be assured, and the problem of tropical civilization by tropical racés will be solved, and tropical products will follow; for civ ilization generates the wants and wishes which impel the poor to labor and the rich to enterprise. A second colony can rise by the light of the first-can profit by our mistakes, and sooner rise to independence.

21. What has been accomplished in the tropics of Africa can be ultimately extended over the same belt around the globe. Ancient colonies were formed by those who escaped from the sacking of their cities, leaving their effects to the flames, and bearing off the aged on their shoulders,

and leading the young by the hand. Their obscurity and remoteness from other nations was their safety. But our colonies will go forth with full supplies, secure in the chivalrous protection of strong nations, and ready to enter the market of the world with the first-fruits of their industry.

22. Much of the tropical race has nearly served out its time under the direction of the Caucasian race. They have earned their outfit. Send them back to the land of the sun. The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose. They shall go out with joy and be sent forth with peace. For God hath made of one blood all the nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath appointed the bounds of their habitation, that by co-operative labor they should work out that good for the sons of men which they should seek after all the days of their life.

CHAPTER LXXV.

THE COLONY IN DANGER.

LETTER FROM REV. JOHN SEYS.

MONROVIA, November 27, 1861.

1. THE brig Ann, of New York, sails to-morrow, will touch at Cape Palmas, and thence proceed immediately to the United States. Although I can not now write to you as fully as I would wish, yet I trust a few lines will not be unacceptable, especially as it is not long since I had the pleasure of writing more at length.

I am happy to be able to say that a kind and watchful Providence still continues to guard the interests of this young and comparatively feeble nation.

2. The dreadful attack from the hostile Spaniards is yet

in the future, and, not unlikely, may be indefinitely postponed. Independently of the very tangible and rather destructive evidence which the Government of Liberia gave the Spanish steamer, on the 11th September, of their readiness and ability to repel any such attack upon them as was then made, it is not at all improbable that they may have heard of the very active part which Great Britain has taken in the affair. So soon as it was known

at Sierra Leone, His Excellency the Governor of that colony dispatched Her B. M. steamer, the Torch, to come at once to the aid of the Liberians, and, on her return, the Falcon took her place, and has been lying for nearly a fortnight in our roads.

3. The utmost, vigilance is kept up on the part of the military and naval forces of the country, and there is cause to believe that should another attack be made, the invader, to use the language of one of the officers of the Falcon to me, may find himself “blown to pieces."

Hostilities of a very serious character have been prevailing among the interior tribes for some time. Towns have been burned, murders committed, and many captives taken.

4. The Liberian Government immediately interposed, and one man, quite an intelligent native, réared in the family of one of the early settlers, and supposed to be a staunch ally and friend of the Republic, has been arrested and is now in jail, after an examination which it is believed will bring him before the grand jury, and may end seriously. Of his complicity with the head men and ringleaders of these wars on innocent allies of Liberia, there seems to be strong evidence.

5. My fears entertained and expressed some time since of a great scarcity of food, have proved as yet groundless. Notwithstanding the failure of your Mary C. Stevens at the time we all expected her, and the fact, in addition, that the visits of American vessels, with full cargoes, are becoming more and more rare, yet there has been no

want. Foreign provisions have been higher, but our na tive breadstuffs have been plentiful, and so far as I can judge, the crisis has passed, and there will be no want of any of the real necessaries of life in Liberia. To. God be all the praise in the first place, and next a meed of praise must be awarded to our farmers, who so industriously keep us supplied with potatoes, and cassavas, and eddoes, and beans, plantains, and bananas, and scores of other good things which this wonderfully prolific soil so luxuriantly produces.

6. The liberated Africans are doing well. The Liberian Government are carrying out, in good faith, their contract with your Society, and I take pleasure in giving the required certificates to that effect. These people improve fast, and I am every day more and more convinced that to efficiently benefit the recaptured African he must be sent to Liberia. Here is found every possible inducement to him to improve, and here, if anywhere in Christendom, he can become a MAN.

CHAPTER LXXVI.

INAUGURAL ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT BENSON, 1860. FRIENDS AND FELLOW-CITIZENS :

1. Two years ago, when addressing you on a similar occasion, it was perhaps equally as foreign to your purpose, as it was to my expectation and desire, that I should this day stand before you again, as your candidate elect, to be inaugurated for the occupancy of the presidential chair of this Republic for another term of two years. Yet, in the course of events, it has been your pleasure, in the exercise of your enlightened and sacred suffrage since that period, to designate me to serve you another term. And

it is in obedience to your sovereign will, as expressed so generally at the ballot-box last May, that I appear before you this day to take upon me the solemn oath enjoined by the fundamental law of this Republic.

2. I feel, fellow-citizens, that I would be no less highly chargeable with a dereliction of duty than I would be outraging my own feelings, were I to permit the present occasion to escape, without attempting, however imperfectly it may be done, an expression of the profound gratitude I feel toward you for the successive unmistakable evidences of confidence reposed in me, by electing me three times to the highest office in your gift. I beg now to assure you that the confidence thus reposed, will produce no effect on me, contrary to that of affording incentives to increased efforts on my part to serve the best interest of our common country.

3. To serve the best interest of Liberia, was by far the leading, if not the only motive that influenced me four years ago to take upon me, by your request, such responsible duties as are involved in the office of the chief magistracy of this Republic. And however tremulously at the time I may have approached the presidential chair, it was a source of much relief to my mind, when I remembered that my public life would be subject to your scrutiny, subject to the verdict of a political tribunal, synonymous with the power that had exalted me to the presidency. In the mandates of that tribunal, as may be expressed at the ballot-box, I hope to always cordially acquiesce, whether they be pro or con.

4. After a public life of four years spent in your midst, it would be a needless tax on your time to attempt now a recapitulation of my administrative policy. This may be proper enough when one is for the first time entering upon his administrative term. But should he continue his incumbency for successive terms, he should expect and desire his constituents to judge him by his works, instead of by his words. This course has been, as a general thing,