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found his way into England, with a box of jewels at his back, and the laws of the kingdom afforded him no security-in such a case, the wonder would be, not that the stranger was robbed of any part of his riches, but that any part was left for a second depredator.* Such, on sober reflection, is the judgment I have formed concerning the pilfering disposition of the Mandingo negroes toward me.

On the other hand, it is impossible for me to forget the disinterested charity, and tender solicitude, with which many of these poor heathens, from the sovereign of Sego, to the poor women who at different times received me into their cottages, sympathized with my sufferings, relieved my distress, and contributed to my safety. Perhaps this acknowledgment is more particularly due to the female part of the nation. Among the men, as the reader must have seen, my reception, though generally kind, was sometimes otherwise. It varied according to the tempers of those to whom I made application. Avarice in some, and bigotry in others, had closed up the avenues to compassion; but I do not recollect a single instance of hard-heartedness towards me in the women. In all my wanderings and wretchedness, I found them uniformly kind and compassionate; and I can truly say, as Mr. Ledyard has eloquently said before me-" To a woman I never addressed myself in the language of decency and friendship, without receiving a decent and friendly answer. If I was hungry or thirsty, wet or ill, they did not hesitate, like the men, to perform a generous action. In so free and so kind a manner did they contribute to my relief, that if I were thirsty, I drank the sweeter draught; and if I were hungry, I ate the coarsest meal with a double relish.”

It is surely reasonable to suppose that the soft and amiable sympathy of nature, thus spontaneously manifested to me in my distress, is displayed by these poor people as occasion requires, much more strongly towards those of their own nation and neighborhood. Maternal affection, neither suppressed by the restraints, nor diverted by the solicitudes of civilized life, is everywhere conspicuous among them, and creates reciprocal tenderness in the child. "Strike me," said a negro to his master, who spoke disrespectfully of his parent, "but do not curse my mother." The same sentiment I found to prevail universally.

I perceived, with great satisfaction, that the maternal solicitude extended not only to the growth and security of the person, but also, in a certain degree, to the improvement of the character; for one of the first lessons which the Mandingo women teach their children, is the practice of truth. A poor unhappy mother, whose son had been murdered by a Moorish banditti, found consolation in her deepest distress from the reflection that her boy, in the whole course of his blameless life, had never told a lie.-Travels in Africa.

ADANSON, who visited Senegal, in 1754, describes the negroes as sociable, obliging, humane, hospitable. "Their amiable simplicity,"

*Or suppose a colored pedlar with valuable goods travelling in slave states, where the laws afford little or no protection to negro property, what would probably be his fate? -ED.

says he, "in this enchanting country, recalled to me the idea of the primitive race of man; I thought I saw the world in its infancy. They are distinguished by tenderness for their parents, and a great respect for the aged." ROBIN speaks of a slave at Martinico, who having gained money sufficient for his own ransom, preferred to purchase his mother's freedom.

PROYART, in his history of Loango, acknowledges that the negroes on the coast, who associate with Europeans, are inclined to licentiousness and fraud; but he says those of the interior are humane, obliging, and hospitable. GOLBERRY repeats the same praise, and rebukes the presumption of white men in despising "nations improperly called savage, among whom we find men of integrity, models of filial, conjugal, and paternal affection, who know all the energies and refinements of virtue; among whom sentimental impressions are more deep, because they observe, more than we, the dictates of nature, and know how to sacrifice personal interest to the ties of friendship."

ALEXANDER H. EVERETT.

Sir, we are sometimes told that all these efforts will be unavailingthat the African is a degraded member of the human family-that a man with a dark skin and curled hair, is necessarily, as such, incapable of improvement and civilization, and condemned by the vice of his physical conformation, to vegetate for ever in a state of hopeless barbarism. Mr. President, I reject, with contempt and indignation, this miserable heresy. In replying to it, the friends of truth and humanity have not hitherto done justice to the argument. In order to prove that the blacks were capable of intellectual efforts, they have painfully collected a few imperfect specimens of what some of them have done in this way, even in the degraded condition which they occupy at present in Christendom. Sir, this is not the way to treat the subject. Go back to an earlier period in the history of our race. See what the blacks were and what they did three thousand years ago, in the period of their greatness and glory, when they occupied the fore front in the march of civilization-when they constituted in fact the whole civilized world of their time. Trace this very civilization, of which we are so proud, to its origin, and see where you will find it. We received it from our European ancestors: they had it from the Greeks and Romans, and the Jews. But, Sir, where did the Greeks and the Romans and the Jews get it? They derived it from Ethiopia and Egypt,-in one word, from Africa. Moses, we are told, was instructed in all the learning of the Egyptians. The founders of the principal Grecian cities, such as Athens, Thebes, and Delphi, came from Egypt, and for centuries afterwards, their descendants returned to that country, as the source and centre of civilization. There it was that the generous and stirring spirits of the time-Herodotus, Homer, Plato, Pythagoras, and the rest, made

their noble voyages of intellectual and moral discovery, as ours now make them in England, France, Germany, and Italy. Sir, the Egyptians were the masters of the Greeks and the Jews, and consequently of all the modern nations in civilization, and they had carried it very nearly as far-in some respects, perhaps, a good deal further than any subsequent people. The ruins of the Egyptian temples laugh to scorn the architectural monuments of any other part of the world. They will be what they are now, the delight and admiration of travellers from all quarters, when the grass is growing on the sites of St. Peter's and St. Paul's,-the present pride of Rome and London.'

Well, Sir, who were the Egyptians? They were Africans:-and of what race?-It is sometimes pretended, that though Africans, and of Ethiopian extraction, they were not black. But what says the father of history, who had travelled among them, and knew their appearance, as well as we know that of our neighbors in Canada? Sir, Herodotus tells you that the Egyptians were blacks, with curled hair. Some writers have undertaken to dispute his authority, but I cannot bring myself to believe that the father of history did not know black from white. It seems, therefore, that for this very civilization of which we are so proud, and which is the only ground of our present claim of superiority, we are indebted to the ancestors of these very blacks, whom we are pleased to consider as naturally incapable of civilization.

So much for the supposed inferiority of the colored race, and their incapacity to make any progress in civilization and improvement. And it is worth while, Mr. President, to remark, that the prejudice which is commonly entertained in this country, but which does not exist to any thing like the same extent in Europe, against the color of the blacks, seems to have grown out of the unnatural position which they occupy among us. At the period to which I have just alluded, when the blacks took precedence of the whites in civilization, science, and political power, no such prejudice appears to have existed. The early Greek writers speak of the Ethiopians and Egyptians as a superior variety of the species:-superior, not merely in intellectual and moral qualities, but what may seem to be much more remarkable, in outward appearance. The Ethiopians, says Herodotus, excel all other nations in longevity, stature, and personal beauty. The black prince, Memnon, who served among the Trojan auxiliaries at the siege of Troy, (probably an Egyptian prince) is constantly spoken of by the Greek and Latin writers, as a person of extraordinary beauty, and is qualified as the son of Aurora, or the morning. There are, in short, no traces of any prejudice, whatever, against the color of the blacks, like that which has grown up in modern times, and, which is obviously the result of the relative condition of the two races. This prejudice forms at present, as was correctly observed by President Madison, in one of his speeches in the late Virginia Convention, the chief obstacle to the practical improvement of the condition of that portion of them who reside in this country.-Speech at Massachusetts Colonization Society, Feb. 7, 1833.

REV. R. WALSH.

I had been but a few hours on shore (at Rio Janeiro) for the first time, and I saw an African negro under four aspects of society; and it appeared to me, that in every one, his character depended on the state in which he was placed, and the estimation in which he was held. As a despised slave, he was far lower than other animals of burden that surrounded him; more miserable in his look, more revolting in his nakedness, more distorted in his person, and apparently more deficient in intellect, than the horses and mules that passed him by. Advanced to the grade of a soldier, he was clean and neat in his person, amenable to discipline, expert at his exercises, and showed the port and bearing of a white man similarly placed. As a citizen, he was remarkable for the respectability of his appearance, and the decorum of his manners in the rank assigned him; and as a priest, standing in the house of God, appointed to instruct society on their most important interests, and in a grade in which moral and intellectual fitness is required, and a certain degree of superiority is expected, he seemed even more devout in his impressions, and more correct in his manners, than his white associates. I came, therefore, to the irresistible conclusion in my mind, that color was an accident affecting the surface of a man, and having no more to do with his qualities than his clothes-that God had equally created an African in the image of his person, and equally given him an immortal soul; and that a European had no pretext but his own cupidity, for impiously thrusting his fellow man from that rank in the creation which the Almighty had assigned him, and degrading him below the lot of the brute beasts that perish,-Notes on Brazil.

ARCHBISHOP SHARP,

The grandfather of Granville Sharp, in a sermon preached before the British House of Commons, one hundred and fifty-six years ago, used the following remarkable language:

"That Africa, which is not now more fruitful of monsters, than it was once for excellently wise and learned men,—that Africa, which formerly afforded us our Clemens, our Origen, our Tertullian, our Cyprian, our Augustin, and many other extraordinary lights in the Church of God, that famous Africa, in whose soil, Christianity did thrive so prodigiously, and could boast of so many flourishing churches,-alas! is now a wilderness. "The wild boars have broken into the vineyard, and ate it up, and it brings forth nothing but briers and thorns," to use the words of the prophet. And who knows but God may suddenly make this church and nation, this our England, which, Jeshurun-like, is waxed fat and grown proud, and has kicked against God, such another example of vengeance of this kind."

152 R. R. MADDEN-MR. DUPUIS-A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD.

R. R. MADDEN.

Some of the finest forms I ever beheld were those of negroes; and had I been desirous of representing the beauty of the human figure, I have seen negroes from Darfur, the symmetry of whose persons might have served for a standard; neither does the observation apply to the intellect of the blacks.

When the negro troops were first brought down to Alexandria, nothing could exceed their insubordination and wild demeanor; but they learned the military evolutions in half the time of the Arabs, and I always observed they went through the manoeuvres with ten times the adroitness of the others. It is the fashion here as well as in our colonies, to consider the negroes as the last link in the chain of humanity, between the monkey tribe and man, but I do not believe the negro is inferior to the white man in intellect; and I do not suffer the eloquence of the slave driver to convince me that the negro is so stultified as to be unfit for freedom.-Travels in Turkey, Egypt, and Nubia, &c.

MR. DUPUIS.

British Consul at Mogadore, says of the whites in slavery under the Moors:

"If they have been any considerable time in slavery, they appear lost to reason and to feeling-their spirits are broken, and their faculties sunken in a species of stupor, which I am unable to describe. They appear degraded even below the negro slave. The succession of hardships, without any protecting law to which they can appeal for alleviation or redress, seems to destroy every species of exertion or hope in their minds. They appear indifferent to every thing around them; abject, servile, and brutish.”

A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD.

The sum of five thousand pounds sterling, stands invested for the mutual benefit of two very excellent înstitutions in London-the Magdalen Asylum and the Foundling Hospital. It was bequeathed to them by one OMICHAND, a black merchant in Calcutta, who left many equally liberal donations to other charitable institutions in all parts of the world.

ANOTHER. A poor negro walking towards Deptford, Eng., saw by the road side an old sailor of a different complexion, with but one arm and two wooden legs. The worthy African immediately took three halfpence and a farthing, his little all, from the side-pocket of

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