In each village was a Chief or Chiefs, freemen and slaves who passed their lives hunting and fighting other tribes.  The sole property of the Chiefs and freemen were their huts, canoes, and slaves, and the rude instruments they used in war and hunting.  The unfortunate slaves were bought and sold, captured in war and were often killed and eaten.  One slave was worth so many goats, lances, or knives, and one large canoe would buy several women.  Legislation rested with the Chiefs and trial by ordeal was common, but always so arranged that the result could be controlled by the judge.  This is not the place however, to describe these interesting, if horrible practices.

Now at present the people are rich beyond the wildest dreams of their ancestors for the value of the property of the great Chiefs has greatly increased, since they have dealt with Europeans.  Again the Chief of a small village containing 1000 men supplies 1000 kilogrammes of rubber each month to the State for 50 centimes a kilo.  To collect this amount takes two or three days; each year therefore the village receives L240 for collecting a substance of no value at all to the natives whose daily routine in the meantime is scarcely affected at all.  The natives used ivory chiefly to make war horns, but some of the Chiefs had so much that they constructed fences of fine points round their mud huts little thinking that in the white man’s country, those useless tusks would be worth a small mountain of salt.  Now they exchange them for clothes, cloth, salt, and other useful commodities.  The lucky owner of a canoe, it is true, can no longer buy three or four slaves with it, but he can use it to transport produce or to catch fish, for which he is well paid.  Again compare the lot of the slave in the past with his present condition.  He was liable to the most terrible fate at any moment; now he can enter the army, work in the plantations or remain safely in his village and do a few hours’ work each month.  There is however, another force acting which we should hardly expect would affect the mind of a savage.  He is greatly influenced by a desire to ascend the social ladder at the summit of which, is of course, the white man, and anyone having direct dealings with him, at once knows himself to be superior to the naked cannibal of the forest.  The servant, or boy, of the white man, holds a high rank and considers himself to be quite another species of man than his cousin, who is still uncivilised.  So also the soldiers and workers in the plantations, who come into daily contact with the officials.  All the most intelligent and ambitious natives are thus drawn away from their primitive condition of life and become attached to their masters, who give them cloth to wear and beads with which to beautify themselves.  The most important Chiefs are as anxious indeed to appear like Europeans, as a prosperous native of Sierra Leone, is to wear patent boots and carry a silk umbrella.  There is one near here named Bayer, a young man of much intelligence and business capacity, who has built himself a brick house, dresses like a European, and is a proud man when he is asked to smoke a cigar on the verandah of the mess.  The Chiefs are, however, never asked to eat with the Europeans, a distinction which is both necessary and wise.