en and die. As the Africans were the only people doomed to
perpetual servitude, and to be the prey of kidnappers, she should have
long since directed almost her undivided efforts to civilize and convert
them,--not by establishing colonies of ignorant and selfish foreigners
among them, who will seize every opportunity to overreach or oppress, as
interest or ambition shall instigate,--but by sending intelligent, pious
missionaries; men fearing God and eschewing evil--living evidences of
the excellence of christianity--having but one object, not the
possession of wealth or the obtainment of power or the gratification of
selfishness, but _the salvation of the soul_. Had she made this attempt,
as she was bound to have made it by every principle of justice and every
feeling of humanity, a century ago, Africa would have been, at the
present day, 'redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled,' and the slavery
of her children brought to an end. No pirates would now haunt her coast
to desolate her villages with fire and sword, in order to supply a
christian people with hewers of wood and drawers of water. How much has
been needlessly lost to the world by this criminal neglect!

The conception of evangelizing a heathenish country by sending to it an
illiterate, degraded and irreligious population, belongs exclusively to
the advocates of African colonization. For absurdity and inaptitude, it
stands, and must forever stand, without a parallel. Of all the offspring
of prejudice and oppression, it is the most shapeless and unnatural. But
more of this hereafter.

History is full of instruction on the subject of colonization. The
establishment of colonies, in all ages, with scarcely an exception, has
resulted either in their subversion by the vices or physical strength of
the natives, or by a fatal amalgamation with them; or else in the rapid
destruction of the natives by the superior knowledge and greedy avarice
of the new settlers. It is presumption to suppose that the colony at
Liberia, composed of the worst materials imaginable, will present an
example of forbearance, stability and good faith, hitherto unwitnessed
in the world.

Soon after its establishment, the colony narrowly escaped a bloody
extirpation, and was the cause of a murderous warfare in which several
of the colonists and a large number of the natives were slain. The
steady growth of the colony excited the jealousy and alarm of some of
the neighboring tribes; and, accordi