too little effort devoted to the advancement and development of the great masses of the Native peoples on the one hand, and on the other among too many Europeans resident in West Africa, official and otherwise, the feeling and belief are too strong that the darker races have a special and inferior place to other races, and that it is among the great aims of life for which the functions of government should be employed and all social pressure invoked, to keep these darker races on this inferior plane.

WEST AFRICAN COLONIAL ATTITUDE TOWARD AMERICANS

*The great majority of Europeans and officials in West Africa do not seem to be of the best class. Service in Africa has always been considered very hazardous for the white man on account of the African fevers, etc. And with the exception of the highest officials and some of the heads of large commercial firms and corporations persons are selected who are unable to secure service in more favored fields. Some of the governors are evidently from the highest European classes, but the greater number of European subordinate officials give evidences that they are taken from the under classes; and when they enter upon their duties in West Africa, with large interest, responsibilities and trusts committed to their care, they too often become arrogant, conceited and oppressive, in their endeavors to impress the public that they belong to the upper European classes. They appear in too many instances in West Africa to devote more thought and effort in aping European nobility in petty snobbery than in the serious solution of the many political and social problems with which they must constantly contend as administrators.

It is natural anyway for the colonial governments in West Africa to be prejudiced toward democratic institutions because of European prejudice toward them. The white American for this reason will find much prejudice against him in West Africa. European officials like and demand more professed and formal courtesy than Americans show officials. The freedom, conversation and conduct of the white Ameri

can keeps colonial officialdom very uneasy less American democratic manners and ideas spread to colonial subjects and thus interfere with European policies of political and social control. Europeans readily recognize the value of Americans along many industrial lines and so long as the latter confine themselves to purely industrial pursuits in the development of the natural resources of the country, there seems to be little or no objection to a few white Americans

In South Africa where American steam engines and agricultural implements are meeting with increasing demands and where the white population is much larger in proportion to the Native, still there the prejudice against and the fear of American democratic manners and political ideas are very marked and manifest, largely on account, however, of the missionary activities of American Negroes. The antiAmerican feeling has not been so pronounced in West Africa because of the paucity of resident Americans, aside from the missionaries, notwithstanding the white population is exceedingly small in comparison to the Native. Nevertheless there is the same feeling as in South Africa because the Natives are restive under the government of an aristocratic political system, imperial in rigor, form and feature. And because of the presence of Liberia and a few Americans there has appeared from time to time what were considered well founded reasons for the political psychology of some of the West African colonial governments.

White American missionaries at different times sought release through the American Legation at Monrovia from oppressive and needless official restrictions on the southwest coast against their locomotion and freedom, some of which went so far as to prohibit them from leaving the colony. But in some of the colonies where the administrators are certainly of a high order, where Native problems are seriously and ably considered as in Northern Nigeria, where prejudice is not so patent and where the hand of authority is neither so heavy nor so oppressive, while white Americans will find little or no signs of outward unwelcome, still they need not flatter themselves with the thought that they are the objects of particular love and affection.

PURPOSE AND NATURE OF THE LIBERIAN DEMOCRACY

In establishing the Liberian Republic, its founders had in mind the creation of a democracy for black men from every section of the world, after much the same fashion that the United States of America was considered an asylum for the oppressed of every land. In so far as the United States had failed in its ideal of a free democracy to all men and races upon the principles of justice and equality, and had been limited to a free democracy for white men only, Liberia was settled with the view and hope that on the West Coast of Africa the black man could govern himself and work out his own destiny and civilization under the institutions of a free and black democracy. As the owners ot the soil, the rulers of the state, and the teachers of the people, here the black man was to take his place in the family, of nations not simply as a black man, but as a man, endowed as other men and susceptible to the same culture, dignity and refinement.

LIBERIAN ATTITUDE TOWARD NATIVE RACES

And while the Liberians were founding a government where black men, exiled from Africa, might return and be free to enjoy all the opportunities and privileges of other men in an independent sovereignty of their own with all the inducements and inspiration of a self-governing democracy, yet in their Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and Constitution, they took care to provide for the liberty of all men amply regulated and protected by law.

They not only held before the whole West African world the dazzling spectacle of a Negro nationality fashioned after the most modern and improved methods in government and statecraft, but they unified their political interest with that of the Native races by a constitutional provision that made the latter, like other persons of African descent, eligible for the citizenship of this new state. They identified themselves further with the aborigines by linking with the establishment of the Liberian government the purpose of bearing the light not only of Christianity and western civilization to the pagan Africans, but they sought the agricultural

and industrial uplift of the Native peoples as well, as is partly disclosed in a miscellaneous provision of the Liberian constitution.1

And before the Liberian colony had entered the Family of Nations she had more than justified her existence by her services to humanity and civilization in the abolition of the traffic in slaves, and in her appeal to all Christendom she set forth few declarations more significant than when she said:

The Native African bowing down with us before the altar of the living God, declares that from us, feeble as we are, the light of Christianity has gone forth; while upon that curse of curses, the slave trade, a deadly blight has fallen as far as our influence extends.2

And since the birth of the Republic thousands of Natives have been incorporated into the Liberian body politic and many are today occupying leading places in the educational, religious, and political life of the state, with finally a representative in the Cabinet as Minister of Education and with an enrollment of more than one-half of the children attending the Liberian public and denominational schools.3

DIFFICULTIES OF LIBERIAN POLITICAL IDEAL

The Liberian ideal is an inspiring one and it appeals to the admiration of the Negro peoples in every section of the civilized globe. At the time it was launched upon the West African coast the political and economic subjection of black men in certain countries were such as to guarantee great promise for the success of the Liberian venture. To find an asylum in Liberia then attracted the best Negro minds and characters under oppression in other countries. The

1 Section 13 of Miscellaneous Provisions of the Constitution, and Declaration of Independence.

2 Declaration of Independence & Dynamic Factors in the Liberian Situation, Journal of Race Development, at Clark University, Worcester, Mass. by George W. Ellis.

3 Education in Liberia, Report of Education, 1907.

great continent of Africa with its amazing wealth and interesting stalwart races, living for the most part under their tribal institutions in their own lands, afforded an opportunity for Negro leadership especially from the United States to be found in no other quarter of our earth. At the most strategic point on the West Coast-at the head of the famous Gulf of Guinea-Liberians and their friends pictured in their minds the future of the West African republic as a powerful and dominating Negro nationality, melting for miles the Native tribes across the rolling plains of the Sudan into a solid and unified democracy, that would not only command all West Africa but exercise a tremendous influence in international thought and affairs.

Often spoken of as "Little America" by the aborigines, the influence of the Liberian republic was carried along the trade routes to the finer tribes of the plains and plateaux of the far interior. The kings and princes of Musahdu exchanged greetings and messages with the presidents of Liberia at Monrovia.

But the lustre of this Liberian ideal was dimmed by the pccurrence of two great events: The liberation of the colored peoples in North America and the West Indies and the partition of Africa by the European powers. The physical emancipation of the blacks in the New World has held from Liberia the vast majority of the Negro peoples with their leaders, by holding out to them the hope of complete freedom and equality in the lands of their exile; and the partition of Africa has not only limited the physical and social fields of Liberian activity, but has forced those who have cast their destiny there into a hard struggle to keep the sovereignty of the nation intact in an ever decreasing geographic domain

So that the 60,000 or 70,000 Americanized Liberians have been forced to witness the painful and distressing experience of seeing the reduction of their original territorial limits, by one neighbor and then another, to about 60,000 square miles, with a present Native population of not more than 2,500,000. And but for the good offices and assistance of the American government in the Liberian crisis of 1908, the chances are