of curse. By this time, however, the public mind must have been disabused of the fallacy we have mentioned, by the very interesting accounts of travels which have, of late years, in some measure dispelled our ignorance respecting this vast continent. Indeed the notion that they are beyond the reach of social and moral improvements bears upon its surface the marks of absurdity and falsehood. Were this true, it would stand as a solitary anomaly in the history of the human race. That the progress of any and every race of men with whom we have become acquainted, in knowledge and virtue, is indefinite; that no limit can be assigned to its extent or acceleration, is a proposition suggested by a thousand direct considerations and obvious analogies, and better deserves the name of an ascertained fact than of a plausible speculation.

In advocating this position in its particular application to the African nations, a modern writer has the following remarks:

"Without pretending to credit all that has been related of the improvements made by the negroes in the different countries which they have been fated to inhabit, we need only cast our eyes upon a few unquestionable facts, and compare their achievements in several situations, to be convinced that this general proposition applies to them as well as to the rest of mankind. The superiority of a negro in the interior of Africa to one on the Slavecoast, is a matter of fact. To see it exemplified, we have only to consult the travels of Mr. Parke, edited by Bryan Edwards ;* and the same observation has been found by Mr. Barrow, applicable to the tribes south of the line, who increase in civilization as you leave the slave-coast. Compare the accounts given by these travellers of the skill, the industry, and the excellent moral qualities of the Africans in Houssa, Tombuctoo, &c. with the pictures that have been drawn of the same race, living in all the barbarity which the supply of our slave-ships requires; you will be convinced that the negro is as much improved by a change of circumstances as the white. The state of slavery is in none of its modifications favourable to improvement; yet compare the creole negro with the imported slave, and you will find that the most debasing and brutifying form of servitude, the pitiless drudgery of the field and the whip, though it must necessarily eradicate most of the moral qualities of the African, has not prevented him from profiting, in his intellectual faculties, by the intercourse of more civilized men. The events in the war of St. Domingo read us a lesson on this point, which it would be happy if we could be permitted to forget; negroes organizing immense armies, laying plans of campaigns and sieges, which, if not scientific, have at least been, to a certain degree, successful against the finest European troops; arranging forms of government, and even proceeding some length in executing the most difficult of human enterprizes; entering into commercial relations with foreigners, and conceiving the idea of contracting alliances, acquiring something like a maritime force, and at any rate navigating vessels in the tropical seas with as much skill and foresight as that complicated operation requires."

This is certainly a spectacle which ought to teach us the effects of circumstances in developing the human faculties, and prescribe bounds to that presumptuous arrogance which would confine to one race the characteristic privilege of the species. We have, indeed, the proof in our losses. We have torn those men from their country, on the vain and wicked pretence that their nature is radically inferior to our own. We have treated them so as to stunt the natural growth of their virtues and their reason. Our crimes have been partly successful; for the West Indians, like all other slaves, have copied some of the tyrant's vices. But their ingenuity has flourished apace, even under all disadvantages; and the negro species is already so much improved, that, now that they are in immediate expectation of their liberty, and with all the manifold blessings in reversion which are ever found to spring and flourish where freedom plants her footstep, we doubt not that we shall see them change the land of their bondage and their tears, into the scene of their increasing prosperity,-into the theatre, upon which a renovated and

*These remarks were written prior to the publications from modern travellers, which so abundantly confirm the positions of the writer.

happy people shall exhibit to the world the triumphs of intellectual and social culture, and the transforming energies of religion. "They may tell us," continues the writer already quoted, "that brute form, and adaptation to the climate, are the only faculties which the negroes of the West Indies possess. Something more than this must concur to form and direct armies, and to distribute civil powers in a state; and the negroes, who in Africa cannot count ten, and bequeath the same portion of arithmetic to their children, must have improved, both individually and as a species, before they can use the mariner's compass, rig square-sailed vessels, and cultivate whole districts of cotton for their own profit in the Caribbee islands."

These remarks embody as much as was known at the time when they were penned, respecting the intellectual and social improvement of the men who nobly fought their way to freedom in St. Domingo. But it is our happiness now to have more satisfactory and delightful proofs of the capacity of the negro mind for all that is excellent in human nature. We can point to thousands of instances in which that despised and calumniated character has, by a new birth, "borne the image of the heavenly;" we can tell of Christian churches, each consisting of thousands of slaves, acquainted with the doctrines and exhibiting the fruits of Christianity; we can tell of some who, largely imbued with the spirit of their divine and approving Master, have died in defence of the property of those very men who have branded them with the accursed name of slave; and we can tell of some, too, who have nobly dared to rise and assert the dignity of their nature, and who have perished, some in the raptures of a glorious conflict for liberty, and others on a no less honourable scaffold, and all as truly the martyrs of liberty as Cato, or Hampden, or Tell. Peace to their ashes, and blessings on their memory, for their unheeded and unrecorded, but illustrious self-devotion!

Before we revert to the more particular subject of this article, that of African exploration, we would apply what has been said, to that impudent American hoax, the Colonization Society. The object of this infamous association is to colonize the coloured population of the United States, who have been born on and naturalized in their constitutions, habits, and social ties, to that soil for many generations upward; to colonize this vast population-whither, would the reader guess?-back to Liberia ! a settlement on that same coast of Africa, to the horrors of which, both natural and social, we have partially adverted above. The motives by which these most christian people are actuated in these efforts are, first, the most rooted and perfectly diabolical hatred of the coloured population; and, secondly, a conviction (probably a very just one) that this part of the nation is the only one in which is found the slightest pity for, or community of feeling with, the slaves which exist in such numbers in the southern states. On both these grounds they are anxious for their removal; and for this purpose have fixed on a spot for their location, perhaps the most heart-sickening on the face of the globe, both for its demoralization, and for its fatality to constitutions formed in a different latitude. We mention this scheme for the purpose of comparing the estimate formed of the character of the coloured population in America, with those intellectual and moral capabilities which we have seen exhibited in the native Africans, and the negroes of the West Indian islands,—a class as far inferior to them, as the savage inhabitants of this country, at the time of the Roman invasion, with their present descendants in Wales. And how do the shameless knaves of the Colonization Society characterize this population, many of whom, in trades, professions, and literature, fill up the most respectable stations in society? We will give the reader some idea, and at the same time justify the strong language we feel bound to adopt, by making one or two brief quotations from the African Repository; a work, whose object is to promote the interests of this society in America, and of which some use has doubtless been made in palming the shallow, short-sighted trick upon the benevolent in England. It may be necessary, in order to make these quotations intelligible, to state that, by a strange infatuation, the coloured population of the States, as essentially Americans as any whom the country contains, are continually designated as Africans! This is much such another case as though v

should designate the living descendants of families which have been settled in the United States ever since the first colonization,- -as Cornishmen, or Londoners! Let the reader take the following passage from the African Repository, as evincing the disposition to which we have referred.

"Among the twelve millions who make up our census-two millions are Africans, separated from the possessors of the soil by birth, by the brand of indelible ignominy, by prejudices mutual, deep, incurable; by an irreconcileable diversity of interests. They are aliens and outcasts; they are, as a body, degraded beneath the influence of nearly all the motives which prompt other men to enterprise, and almost below the sphere of virtuous affections. In every part of the United States there is a broad and impassable line of demarcation between every man who has one drop of African blood in his veins, and every other class in the community. The habits, the feelings, all the prejudices of society,--prejudices which neither refinement, nor argument, nor education, nor religion itself, can subdue,-mark the people of colour, whether bond or free, as the subjects of a degradation inevitable and incurable. The African in this country belongs, by birth, to the very lowest station in society, and from that station he can never rise, be his talents, his enterprise, his virtues, what they may. They constitute a class by themselves, out of which no individual can be elevated, and below which none can be depressed.

"Let the free black in this country toil from youth to age in the honourable pursuit of wisdom; let him store his mind with the most valuable researches of science and literature; and let him add to a highly-gifted and cultivated intellect, a piety, pure, undefiled, and 'unspotted from the world:' it is all nothing, he would not be received into the lowest walks of society. If we were constrained to admire so uncommon a being, our admiration would mingle with disgust; because, in the physical organization of his frame, we meet an insurmountable barrier even to an approach to social intercourse; and, in the Egyptian colour which nature has stamped upon his features, a principle of repulsion so strong as to forbid the idea of a communion, either of interest or feeling, as utterly abhorrent. Whether these feelings are founded in reason or not, we will not now inquire! perhaps they are not!! But education, and habit, and prejudice have so firmly riveted them upon us, that they have become as strong as nature itself. And, to expect their removal, or even their slightest modification, would be as idle and preposterous as to expect that we could reach forth our hands, and remove the mountains from their foundations!"

Who does not blush to belong to the same species with men who, after this profession of devilish malignity and tyranny, dare to pollute the sacred name and memory of Washington with the leprosy of their panegyric; and still worse, to cant and prattle to the world of their religious revivals!

But it is time to return from this digression, into which our abhorrence of this foul conspiracy has led us, to the subject which we have more particularly in view. After what has been said, few will deny that it is already high time that something should be done to redress the wrongs which we have brought upon Africa; and the preliminary step to all the efforts of benevolence, or of enterprise, is obviously the exploration of the Continent, which as yet has been little more than begun. "It would be," says Lander, "a truly magnificent undertaking to traverse the unexplored regions between Lattakoo, and the (so called) Mountains of the Moon; and every way worthy the courage and enterprise of an Englishman. I really believe, that a person acquainted with the genius and usages of the natives, and possessing a persevering, undaunted spirit, with an unruffled temper, would find no insurmountable difficulties against accomplishing the object, stupendous as it may at first appear; he might soon and easily accommodate himself to the manners of the Africans, which are generally mild and simple, and do not differ in many very essential points from the Cape to Bornou; and, leaving gradually and almost imperceptibly the healthy for the insalubrious climates, his frame would be prepared by such degrees to encounter the transition."

In accordance with this suggestion, an expedition has been planned, which contemplates no less an object than the exploration of Africa, from the Cape to the Mediterranean. The specific designs of its projectors will be learned from a prospectus hitherto unpublished, with the principal part of which we will close this article; only expressing a hope, that the enterprising individuals with whom the plan has originated will have the satisfaction of safely carrying it to full execution, and that it may result in opening a vast and untrodden field to the benevolent energies of the Christian world.

"This expedition, it is proposed, shall proceed from the Cape of Good Hope in the south, and attempt an egress, by way of the great lake Tchad, at some part on the shores of the Mediterranean in the north. From the intended sphere of operation, this undertaking is obviously one of pre-eminent importance; for there is now no part of the globe which presents a grander field for enterprise and investigation than Southern and Central Africa.

"The Continent of Africa has from the earliest periods attracted the curiosity and interest of the civilized world; and, whether philosophically or politically considered, now possesses peculiar claims to attention. It can scarcely excite surprise, therefore, that such an undertaking as the present has at length been projected, but, on the contrary, that it has not before aroused the spirit of adventure; particularly in an age when enterprise prescribes to itself no bounds but the limits of the globe. No part of the earth has perplexed the learned with greater geographical problems; and, though many of these have been solved, yet, if all that discovery has effected were considered with reference to the centuries occupied in its accomplishment, and to all that is now left to be accomplished, Africa might appear destined to remain the terra incognita of the world. It is, in fact, a reproach to the geographical science of the nineteenth century, that, while continents, in comparison but recently discocovered, have been fully explored, and their geography established, the interior of this vast region should continue unknown, and still exhibit little better than a blank in our maps. A corresponding spirit to that which has hitherto so liberally patronized our Arctic investigations, will now, perhaps, be directed to a not less useful, as well as a more prolific field of observation, the exploration of Africa.

"The efforts which have been made, and are still making, in relation to Africa, in the exploration of her coasts; the determination of the long problematical course of the Niger; the colonization of Algiers by the French; the settlement of Liberia by the Americans; the oftentimes proposed and now probable extension of the Cape colony to its highly valuable contiguity, the healthy and productive country of Natal; tending, as they do, to remove the barrier which has hitherto opposed the access of European travellers, and to develop the benefits which may result to commerce and civilization from an intercourse with her interior: all leave the most important questions unresolved.

"The objects of the proposed expedition are those dictated by science and philanthropy ; and are important alike to the geographer, the geologist, the naturalist, and the philanthropist; to each of whom is opened in prospective a hitherto unfrequented world. There can be no doubt that the interior of Africa will present not only a novel, but a highly valuable field for philosophic research; and that every department of scientific inquiry, and the various branches of natural history, may obtain the most interesting conclusions from its investigation. And, although this expedition is not of a trading character, the value of its results would not be fully developed, without adverting to the advantages which might accrue to commerce, in the probable extension of our traffic among districts and nations hitherto not known, or known only to exist. But, independently of the benefits it may produce both in a scientific and commercial point of view, and of discoveries, especially, which may lay open countries rich in mineral productions, its importance would be obvious, if it had alone for its object to determine the geography of unknown Africa. For this purpose, some extended attempt is greatly to be desired, whereby, at least, the way may be prepared for succeeding efforts to prosecute a detailed examination of the whole interior: the present intent is, therefore, not merely to investigate particular parts, or to traverse those already partially known, but to break up entirely new ground in the field of discovery. And, as it has been imputed, that, notwithstanding the indefatigability of some of the greatest African travellers, little or nothing has been measured, it will be a leading object with the conductor of the present expedition, to establish the exact position of every locality, and, in general, to effect as much as may be practicable, by scientific observations and graphical delineations, for the geography of Africa.

"Other objects than physical discoveries will, however, characterize this expedition, and will give it a peculiar importance in the view of the Christian philanthropist; who will, doubtless, be excited by the deepest interest in the very name of unknown Africa. To him it will be apparent, that an extended sphere of observation and benevolence cannot fail to be presented throughout the whole line of discovery; nor will the party, while prosecuting the general purposes of their enterprise, be inattentive to this great prospective result. It will, 2D. SERIES, NO. 43.-VOL. IV. 187.-VOL. XVI.

2 R

with them, be a primary object of investigation, to ascertain the local genius of African character and language, and the suitability of locations, which may hereafter become the means, not only of extending our acquaintance with the adjacent interior, but of effecting an intercourse with the nations by whom it is peopled: stations that may ultimately serve as centres from which may be diffused a knowledge of Christianity and the arts of civilized life. Every consideration, however, of what may be accomplished for the future good of this country, cannot fail to awaken a painful reflection with regard to its present condition. For, were the fact adverted to, that, from the little which is known of Africa, the most conversant topographers vary in their estimates of her population from thirty to one hundred and sixty millions; and were the extent of her civilization now to be compared with but this lowest computation of souls, the sad disproportion must surely evince the comparative inefficiency of the means hitherto employed, and the necessity of greater efforts on the part of those who may desire the, otherwise far distant, day of visitation for Africa: a continent, which has long called loudly on the moral responsibility of the civilized world, for the amelioration of her physical condition, and the circulation of truth among her nations; a continent where human nature is oftentimes to be recognized only by its external form, and where, in general, the best estate of mankind, and of humanity itself, is that of the lowest barbarism, and of man trafficking in his fellow-man. And if, for the most unhallowed of purposes, a large portion of the interior is penetrated, and that, as it is repeatedly, by slave-dealers from the eastern coast, it is a reproach to our boasted spirit of enterprise and philanthropy that it should be still unknown to us: for exploration and discovery are, unquestionably, the first steps towards the attainment of every ulterior object connected with the well-being of Africa; especially in breaking through that barrier, which an illicit intercourse in human beings has for ages opposed to the investigation of this continent, lest attempts for such a purpose should lead to the results so long desired by Englishmen—the annihilation of a nefarious market, and the abolition of a monstrous slave-trade.

"The practicability of an undertaking such as that now projected, in spite of its magnitude, has been forcibly pointed out by the enterprising Lander, who wrote the passage which we have quoted, in Northern Africa, on the confines of the regions which are now proposed to be explored, about the very time that the Projector was forming his determination in Southern Africa. Although the intended enterprise is more extensive in its nature than any of the attempts which have yet been made to penetrate the African interior, it is, at the same time, differently directed at its very outset. For the present explorators do not propose to themselves the too often, and fatally prosecuted course of rushing at once from the salubrious climes of Europe, into those parts of Africa proverbially baneful to human existence; but, of first proceeding from and through, a part of the continent known to be healthy, and among a people reputed to be comparatively friendly: thus, while the party would become gradually inured to the peculiar difficulties of African travelling, they would also have an opportunity of ascertaining their means of resistance and support, before they were so far involved as to render retreat or succour impossible. There is scarcely a rational doubt, that an expedition properly organized, pursuing this course, would be able to advance unopposed, a considerable distance into the unknown Southern interior without encountering formidable obstacles or a pestilential clime. It is, indeed, barely possible to open our maps, and any longer overlook so important and obvious a fact, that more might be done for the exploration of Africa, and the dissemination of civilization and religion throughout that continent, from the South, than from all other quarters together. And, in estimating the prospect of successfully prosecuting the route proposed, it should be remembered, that for ages it was deemed impossible to pass the deserts which girdle Northern Africa, but across which, as it has been lately remarked, there is now a highway to the central states of Bornou, comparatively as safe as many a European road; and should it be found at all practicable once to penetrate through the unexplored regions of the Southern interior, it will demonstrate the possibility of establishing a future traffic from almost any quarter between the extreme South and extreme North of this vast and obscure section of the earth. "The actual direction of the route to be pursued, must, it will be apparent, greatly depend on local contingencies; for beyond Lattakoo (Littakun) or Kurrechane, so little is positively known, that the contemplated course will necessarily be almost wholly conjectural. The Southern tropic, however, it is supposed, has been lately reached by traders from the South; and there is little doubt that an extensive intercouse is carried on in the interior by slave dealers and others; whose track has been, vaguely perhaps, rumoured to extend nearly from one side of the continent to the other. Such a line has, in fact, been long proposed by Europeans on the respective coasts, and from this prevailing idea of experienced men, may be inferred the possibility of penetrating that part of the interior from any other direction. There are, in short, certain leading facts connected with the geographical and topographical history of Southern Africa, obviously suggesting the route to be pursued; and which, if insurmountable obstacles do not intervene, would probably include some of the confluences, and perhaps, the actual source and course of the yet unexplored Congo or Zaire.