With such additions to her strength, the resources of Liberia will be brought out and developed.  Communication with America will be made easier and cheaper.  The toiling masses left behind will have before them the constant example of numbers of their race living in comfort and increasing prosperity under their own government.  Many will become eager to secure the same advantages, and gradually a migration will begin that will carry hundreds of thousands from the house of bondage to the promised land.

It is absurd to declaim about “expatriation” and to declare such a movement forced and unnatural.  The whole course of history reveals men leaving their homes under pressure of one cause or another, and striking out into new fields.  The western course of migration has reached its uttermost limit, and the tide must turn in other directions.  One vast and rich continent remains; upon it the eyes of the world are fixed.  Already the aggressive Aryan has established himself wherever he can gain a foothold; but the greater part of the country is forever barred to him by a climate which he cannot subdue.

To whom then can this rich territory offer greater inducements than to the colored people of the United States?  And what is more natural and rational than that they, when the population of the country approaches the migration point, should follow the line of least resistance and turn their steps to the home of their forefathers.

AUTHORITIES.

The sources of information which proved most useful to the writer are: 

The Annual Reports of the A.C.S., together with the files of its quarterly journal, the African Repository.

Messages of Presidents of Liberia, and the Reports of Secretaries of Treasury, War, and Navy.

The Archives of the Maryland State Colonization Society, preserved by the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore.

* * * * *

KENNEDY:  Colonization Report.

ALEXANDER:  History of Colonization. 1845.

GURLEY:  Report on Condition of Liberia. 1850.

CARL RITTER:  Begruendung u. gegenwaertige Zustaende der Negerrepublik
Liberia. 1852.

ANDERSON:  Narrative of a Journey to Musardu. 1870.

LATROBE:  Maryland in Liberia. 1885.

WAUWERMANS:  Liberia; Histoire de la Fondation d’un Etat negre libre. 1885.

SCHWARTZ:  Einiges ueber das interne Leben der Eingebornen Liberias. 
Deutsche Kolonialzeitung. 1887.

—­Die Neger-Republik Liberia.  Das Ausland. 1888.

BLYDEN:  Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race.

BUeTTIKOFER:  Reisebilder aus Liberia. 1890.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 1:  Letter to Philip A. Bruce, dated London, April 8, 1889.]

[Footnote 2:  James Ferguson, Life of Hopkins.  Hopkins’ Circular, 1793.]