44 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of no importance whatever, only that it was a white person who was 

 the questioner. These parents will not learn that a child taught sys- 

 tematically to lie to others will lie to them, and any detected prevari- 

 cation with them is in the same way cruelly punished ; and, as the 

 ignorant never punish except when in a rage, it is safe to say that the 

 life of the young darkey is not a pleasant one. 



The peculiarities and monstrosities of African religion (so called) 

 have been too often described to require many words here. In the 

 cant of the present time, a number of Protestant denominations, each 

 at war with the others, assume and allow to the others the title " ortho- 

 dox." It is difficult for a layman to understand how twenty different 

 bodies all teaching different faiths can all be orthodox, but so it is, 

 and under this ruling the various African churches are all orthodox. 

 How far are the vices, described as appertaining to the race, modified 

 by religion ? Not much. With the ordinary African religion is not a 

 matter of doing, but entirely a matter of feeling. If one of them, 

 after spending an entire week in vicious living, can only get up a cer- 

 tain amount of enthusiastic feeling during the shouting, howling, and 

 dancing of a Sunday-night meeting, he feels that his soul is washed 

 and that it is spotless as snow. It is the same ratiocination that con- 

 vinces every convicted negro murderer that he will ascend directly 

 from the gallows into heaven. Other more phlegmatic sinners may be 

 compelled to wait for the judgment-day, but for him the gates of heaven 

 stand wide open. When pai'don follows sin so rapidly, it is not to be 

 wondered at that he is ready to fall again to-morrow. 



What has been written of the African people in this paper has in 

 view those who live in the country and have but limited intercourse 

 with minds superior to their own ; a class of people who, if left to 

 themselves, would degenerate rapidly into barbarism. But for the 

 small leaven of more intelligent whites, the black people would soon be 

 victims of voudoo. Indeed, it is hard to find a rural community in the 

 South where that dreadful bugbear is not more or less believed in and 

 feared. Often a stupid, uneducated negro secretly dominates an en- 

 tire neighborhood by virtue of a self-assertion that he possesses mystic 

 powers, and an obscure hint of a dirty little bag of miscellaneous 

 abominations carries far more terror than ever did overseer's whip. I 

 may defy the magician's power and openly submit myself to his su- 

 pernatural malevolence, but it will do but little toward assuaging the 

 fears of the negroes, who agree that the spells have no power over an- 

 other race. 



I have never had the craze of enforced education or enforced tem- 

 perance ; all the same, I shall be glad to see the colored people as 

 well as the whites educated : not in high- schools, with a view of del- 

 uging the country with school-teachers, but to the extent of giving 

 every child a good common-school education. In my official charac- 

 ter as school director (to which office I was once elected simply because 



