able labor in West Africa provided by the Kru tribes of the coast-line should not become the monopoly of any of her commercial rivals. France, whose possessions surround Liberia on all sides save the sea-board and north-west corner, and who in recent years has constantly encroached upon the Republic's boundaries, would willingly annex the whole territory if she were allowed; and so, doubtless, would Germany under similar conditions of toleration. But all three Powers, watching with suspicion the movements of the others, and pursuing with varying degrees of success their intrigues at Monrovia, now with the Executive and now with the Legislature, agree in loudly proclaiming their attachment to the "independence of the Republic." While France's ambitions are mainly political and "Imperial," both England and Germany have important commercial concerns at stake in the country, and between them a perpetual obscure warfare is relentlessly waged. They also agree in one thing alone, i.e. in using for their own ends-perfectly legitimate ends I has ten to add the professional Liberian politician, in playing off the Executive against the Legislature and vice versa, and, like their Governments, outbidding one another in tender regard for the "independence of the Republic," to the refrain of "Codlin's your friend, not Short."

In the midst of this turmoil of conflicting interests, a handful of American negroes, inflated with the exaggerated notion of their own importance which it has been the policy of the Powers to foster for their own purposes; deeply suspicious of Europeans; utterly incapable of imposing their authority upon the aboriginal population who do not acknowledge them; possessing neither administrators nor diers; corrupt and incompetent (for which others are more blameworthy than themselves), play their foolish lit

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tle farce of self-government on non-African lines, with their Cabinet, Senate, and House of Representatives, indulge in their wretched little disputes, their elections, their religious bickerings, their theological disquisitions; existing at all, not by merit of their own la bors or by the fruits of their own toil, but by customs dues levied upon trade between the Europeans and the abo rigines, enforced often enough by the raids of an undisciplined militia or by the operation of a solitary gunboat which British philanthropy supplies them with, and renews at intervalswhen the weight of accumulated barnacles upon an unscraped bottom, and rusty engines, have combined to put each successive gift out of action. The picture is at once ludicrous and pathetic, involves the utmost discredit to the Powers, who have tolerated it so long, is unfair to the Liberians themselves, gravely unjust to the aboriginal population, and a bar to all possibility of progressive advance on their part.

There are, therefore, two problems involved: the problem of what to do with the American negroes and their descendants, mainly confined to parts of the coast; and of how to determine the future government of the two million aborigines and the extensive coun try they inhabit. A really active policy, based upon persistence in treating these two distinct problems as a single one, cannot fail to be attended with results even more pernicious than in the past.

Let us glance at the general situation as it affects the Liberians,-i.e. the American negroes, or rather mulattoes, for most of the politicians who rule the roost are of mixed blood-and as they affect the situation. In the first place, consider the utter folly of expecting that a handful of descendants of freed slaves, originally torn from every con ceivable part of Western Africa-Ibos and Yorubas. Joloffs from Senegal, Ba

congos from the Lower Congo, and so forth-divorced from African customs and climatic resisting-power by centuries of residence and servitude under White rule in far distant temperate or semi-temperate zones, having not only completely lost touch with African ideas and become impregnated with alien notions, but, through their transmutations including the infusion of White blood, having virtually lost their racial identity, can by any conceivable possibility evolve in any inhab ited part of Africa an African State, or be capable of maintaining law and or der among indigenous communities numbering two million souls. And having realized the magnitude of so preposterous a belief, graft upon it the additional absurdity of expecting that this autonomous African State can be (without resources-this by the way) framed out of the political and social machinery which the White race has created for its own needs, as though the needs of Europe or of North America were on all fours with those of tropical Africa. Patriarchal rule, communal ownership in land, co-operative labor; to be replaced, forsooth, by a Republic founded upon White-man made laws, individual tenure and hired labor-and this revolution to be wrought by so impossible a medium under such impossible conditions! It is sad to be compelled to say it, but African philanthropy of the past century, with so great a balance to its credit as a destructive force, has, as a constructive force, committed appalling miscalculations. The case of Liberia is one in point.

Far graver, of course, is the case of the Congo.

An edifice reared upon such rotten foundations could not stand, and but for the knowledge that behind the frock-coated mulatto lay the guns of Europe, the native tribes would long ago have swept the Liberians into the sea. The whole idea is unscientific.

All that the Liberians can be reasonably called upon to do is to govern and maintain themselves. They cannot be blamed for having failed to govern a country as large as Scotland and Belgium, in the vast bulk of which, after sixty years of "independence," none of them have ever set foot. It is the duty of the protecting Powers, and above all that of the United States, which placed them, or acquiesced in their being placed, in so hopeless a position, to relieve them of a task quite beyond their powers. If such action is required of the Powers in regard to the Liberians themselves, their responsibility equally great towards the aboriginal inhabitants of this part of West Africa. It is of them and their interests that I would speak.

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Sympathy with the American negroes is legitimate and natural. Like most human beings, they have excellent traits. But is not a measure of regard also due to the aboriginal peoples? They are infinitely more numerous. Anthropologically, at any rate, they are a good deal more interesting. The rôle of some of them is an inestimable one in West African economy. Yet they suffer both directly and indirectly from the present state of affairs. This cannot truthfully be denied. Yet never a word is heard on their behalf, and they have no means of putting their views before the world, whereas the Liberians have powerful apologists and defenders in both hemispheres-not always disinterested, perhaps. But of this the general public is naturally unaware, and it is far easier to evoke a tenderness of sentiment for "poor little struggling Liberia" in the popular mind, to which Liberia presents itself in the manner I have indicated, than to obtain a hearing for the just rights, actual and potential. of the indigenous tribes.

Take the case of the Krus, with whom the American blacks and mulattoes are perpetually at loggerheads. Reference

has already been made to the character of the Kru-boy's services to every form of business activity on the West Coast. You will find him at work on almost every trading station from the Gambia to Fernando Po, the Congo excepted. When it is suggested to a Kru-boy who has clambered up the side of a West African steamer at anchor off his town, and stands on deck wet and glistening with the spray of the surf, the magnificent muscles of chest and arm swelling out beneath his velvet skin, that he should go to the Congo, he does not wait to hear more, but promptly takes a header overboard, sharks or no sharks. But if the proposed destination is anywhere but Congo, he is "on time." It is hard to say what the European steamers engaged in the West African trade would do without the Kruboy, both above and below decks, and many a Jack-Tar on the Cape Squadron hails from "We Country." But the indebtedness of Europeans to the Krus is far more comprehensive, and goes much farther back.

Born traders, from the sixteenth century downwards they have been among the most active commercial clients of Europe on the West Coast, and they have treated Europeans well, in days when the white pioneers of trade-human, vegetable and mineral!-were practically at the mercy of the African native. Their reputation for courtesy. and industry is recorded by nearly all the old authors, and when they departed from that rule there was usually good cause. Barbot, writing of the Cape Mesurado (Monrovia) people early in the eighteenth century,' says:

What I have said of their ill-nature

must not, however, be understood to extend to all foreigners, but only to those of the same nation from whom they have been injured; for to others who have had no broils with 2 As the Krus call their home in pigeonEnglish.

3 1732.

them they are civil and kind enough. . . For it is too well known that many of the European nations trading amongst these people have very unjustly and inhumanely, without any provocation, stolen away from time to time abundance of the people, when they came aboard their ships in a harmless and confiding manner, carried great numbers away to the plantations, and there sold them with the other slaves

they had purchased for their goods.

It would be well if Europeaus of the present generation who discourse so glibly of the "barbarity" of the African native were sometimes to cast their minds backwards.

When the American strangers came amongst them, the Kru tribes were nat urally determined to retain, unfettere l and unimpaired, their ancient trading relations with the outer world, and it was only on these conditions that they ultimately consented to recognize the political jurisdiction of the newcomers. But no sooner did the Liberians feel themselves internationally secure than. driven by the paucity of their ex chequer and a fancy to better their own position at the expense of the mere "bush-nigger," they began to interfere with the Kru trade and to enforce their will by means of one of the famous gunboats of which I have already spoken. They have been doing so ever since. The Krus nearest the British frontier have repeatedly called upon the authorities of Sierra Leone for protection, and numerous have been the remonstrances made to the Monrovia Executive. In 1853 the British Consul at that place brought the grievances of the Krus to the notice of the Sierra Leone Government. In 1864 the Monrovia Executive passed a port of entry law shutting out several of the Kru tribes from access to foreigners. This action gave rise to renewed representa tions. Shortly afterwards the Gallina tribe at Cape Mount was subjected to raids by Liberian militia, and appealed