civil
courts unless complainants could prove that they were men of some
substance. Immense indignation was the result; yet the measure has proved
most beneficial. The negro no longer squares up to you in the suburbs and
dares the 'white niggah' to strike the 'black gen'leman.' He mostly limits
himself to a mild impudence. If you ask a well-dressed black the way to a
house, he may still reply, 'I wonder you dar 'peak me without making
compliment!' The true remedy, however, is still wanting, a 'court of
summary jurisdiction presided over by men of honour and probity.'
[Footnote: _Wanderings in West Africa_, ii. pp. 231-23.]

It cannot be said that the Sa Leonite has suffered from any want of
religious teaching or educational activity. On the contrary, he has had
too much of both.

After the collapse of Portuguese missionary enterprise on the West Coast,
the first attempts to establish Wesleyan Methodism at Sa Leone were made
in 1796, when Dr. Thomas Coke tried and failed. The Nova Scotian colonists
in 1792 had already brought amongst them Wesleyans, Baptists, and Lady
Huntingdon's connexion. This school, which differs from other Methodists
only in Church government, still has a chapel at Sa Leone. Thus each sect
claims 1792 as the era of its commencement in the colony. In 1811 Mr.
Warren, the first ordained Wesleyan missionary, reached Freetown and died
on July 23, 1812. He was followed by Mrs. Davies, the prima donna of the
corps: she 'gathered up her feet,' as the native saying is, on December
15, 1815. Since that time the place has never lacked an unbroken
succession of European missionary deaths.

The Church Missionary Society, founded in 1799, sent out, five years
afterwards, its first representatives, MM. Renner and Hartwig, Germans
supported by English funds. In 1816 they devoted themselves steadily to
converting the 'recaptives,' and many of them, together with their wives,
fell bravely at their posts. In twenty years thirty-seven out of seventy
died or were invalided. The names of Wylander and W. A. B. Johnson are
deservedly remembered. Nearly half a million sterling was spent at Sa
Leone, where the stone church of Kissy Road was built in 1839, and that of
Pademba Road in 1849. The grants were wisely withdrawn in 1862. At the
present moment only 300_l_. is given, and the church is reported to be
self-supporting. The first bishopric was established in 1852. In 1861
Bishop Beckles instituted the native Church pas