o hold
office, and to exercise all the precious rights of Englishmen. Instead of
being apprenticed or bound to labour for some seven years under
superintendence, and being taught to clear the soil, plant and build, as
in similar cases a white man assuredly would have been, they were allowed
to loaf, lie, and cheat through a life equally harmful to themselves and
others. 'Laws of labour,' says an African writer, [Footnote: _Sierra Leone
Weekly Times_, July 30, 1862.] 'may be out of place (date?) in England, but
in Sierra Leone they would have saved an entire population from trusting
to the allurements of a petty, demoralising trade; they would have saved
us the sight of decayed villages and a people becoming daily less capable
of bearing the laborious toil of agricultural industry. To handle the hoe
has now become a disgrace, and men have lost their manhood by becoming
gentlemen.' I shall presently return to this subject.

Thus the four colonies which successively peopled Sa Leone were composed
of destitute paupers from England, of fugitive Nova Scotian serviles, of
outlawed Jamaican negroes, and of slave-prisoners or criminals from every
region of Western and inner Africa.

The first society of philanthropists, the 'Sierra Leone Company,' failed,
but not without dignity. It had organised a regular government, and even
coined its own money. In the British Museum a silver piece like a florin
bears on the obverse 'Sierra Leone Company, Africa,' surrounding a lion
guardant standing on a mountain; the reverse shows between the two numbers
50 and 50 two joined hands, representing the union of England and Africa,
and the rim bears 'half-dollar piece, 1791,' the year of the creation of
the colony. The Company's intentions were pure; its hopes and expectations
were lofty, and the enthusiasts flattered themselves that they had proved
the practicability of civilising Africa. But debt and native wars ended
their career, and transferred, on January 1, 1808, their rights to the
Crown. The members, however, did not lose courage, but at once formed the
African Institution, the parent of the Royal Geographical Society.

The government of the Crown colony has undergone some slight
modifications. In 1866 it was made, with very little forethought, a kind
of government-general, the centre of rule for all the West African
settlements. The unwisdom of this step was presently recognised, and Sa
Leone is now under a charter dated December 17,