Company had "ascertained the power of introducing agriculture, friendly commerce and freedom itself into Africa. It had shown that all the various natural products brought from the West Indies, might be raised on the African soil; that the native chiefs might be made to perceive the full interests of peaceful communication; and that negroes in a state of freedom, might be habituated to labor in the fields, and were capable of being governed by mild laws, without whips, tortures or chains to enforce submission to civil authority." Twenty years have elapsed, since the proof has been complete, that native Africans or negroes, do not need even an hour's drilling by slavery, to prepare them for liberty; since, from the moment, that they are landed from the slave ships, and placed under the protection and coercion of the equitable laws of the settlement, their behaviour has always been, as a body, singularly inoffensive, submissive and affectionate; and their industry, equal to any thing which could have been expected from any body of men in their circumstances. Of this, upwards of twenty thousand, are the living evidences. Nearly twenty years have elapsed, since they have had Christian missionaries, amongst them, of the noblest stamp, who have lived and died for them, and some of whose services have been eminently blessed. And both the local and national governments have been full of law and of regulations and exertion against the African slave trade. Yet, it has been recently ascertained, that Sierra Leone itself has been (clandestinely indeed, yet to an extent almost incredible to those who have not explored the evidence) a nursery for the African slave trade; and it is a simple fact, of which none need be ignorant, that the missionary influence of Sierra Leone, upon Africa—Yes, even upon the immediately adjoining districts of Africa, up to this day, is next to nothing!!
What sanity then, is there in expecting that Liberia, or that any other, not strictly speaking missionary settlement on the coast of Africa, shall be of a higher character, or exercise a happier influence while slavery remains! except indeed there be sense in the colonization logic, viz. either, that transporting annually thousands or tens of thousands of "the most corrupt, depraved and abandoned people of the United States," as colonizationists call them, to Liberia, will civilize Africa!! or, that making a careful selection, from this reputed mass of corruption, for the sake of Africa, and consequently sending away only one in a hundred or less, the whole mass will be eventually removed, and thus disgorge the United States of the outraged class, which the color-phobiasts nauseate. This subject may afford edification perhaps to young moralists and mathematicians by being offered to their notice in the following form,
