The colonists, even in their early feebleness, set their face resolutely against the slave trade:  its repression was a cardinal principle.  Their first serious wars were waged on its account.  Ashmun risked his life in the destruction of the factories at New Cesters and elsewhere.  The slavers, warned by many encounters, forsook at first the immediate neighborhood of the settlements, and, as the coast line was gradually taken up, abandoned at length, after many a struggle, the entire region.  Six hundred miles of the coast was permanently freed from an inhuman and demoralizing traffic that defied every effort of the British naval force.  Nor was this all.  The natives were reconciled by the introduction of a legitimate commerce which supplied all they had sought from the sale of human beings.

In still another way did the colony exercise a humane influence.  Among the natives exists a domestic slavery so cruel and barbarous that the lot of the American plantation Negro seemed paradise in comparison.  Life and limb are held of such small value that severe mutilation is the penalty of absurdly slight transgressions, or is imposed at the arbitrary displeasure of the master, while more serious offenses are punished by death in atrocious form:  as when the victim is buried alive with stakes driven through his quivering body.[16] The institution is of course a difficult one to uproot.  But among the natives in the more thickly settled portions of the country it has ceased, and is mitigated wherever the influence of the Government penetrates, while the number of victims is greatly diminished by the cessation of inter-tribal warfare.

In this way Liberia has proved, from the standpoint of humanity, pre-eminently successful.

3. As a Step toward the Civilization of Africa.

George Whitefield is said to have declared to Oglethorpe when lamenting his failure to exclude slavery from Georgia, that he was making a mistake:  the Africans were much better off as slaves than in their native barbarism, and would receive a training that would enable them ultimately to return and civilize the land of their nativity.  In this bold idea he anticipated one of the leading thoughts of the fathers of colonization, and, perhaps prophesied, a great migration which the world is yet to see.  But to confine ourselves to the present and the strictly practical—­there is to the interior of Liberia, sweeping away beyond the valley of the Niger, a country of teeming population and vast resources.  That this territory be opened to the commerce of the world, and the blessings of civilization be conferred upon the people, it is necessary that some impulse of enlightenment come from without.  The casual visit of the trader has been proved by experience to do vastly more harm than good.  Vice and demoralization have too often followed in his track.  The direction and instruction of European agents accomplish little.  The best efforts of all men of this class have resulted in an unequal hand-to-hand fight with the deadly climate, in which no white man can work and live.  Besides, the natives need more than guidance; they must have before them the example of a civilized settlement.