420 DIFFERENCES IN 



llshed Itself without the prejudices of the^ old ; — where 

 religion is in all its fervour, without needing an alliance 

 with the state to maintain it ; ^here the law commands by 

 the respect which it Inspires, without being enforced by any 

 military power. 



The superiority of the whites is universally felt and 

 readily acknowledged by the other races. The most intel- 

 ligent Negro, whom Mr. Park * met with, after witnessing 

 only such evidences of European skill and knowledge, as 

 the English settlement of Pisania afforded, and being ac- 

 quainted with two or three Englishmen, would sometimes 

 appear pensive, and exclaim with an involuntary sigh, 

 "Black men are nothing!" The narratives of travellers 

 abound with similar traits. This consciousness best explains 

 the fact of the Negroes generally submitting quietly to their 

 state of slavery in the European colonies. If the relations 

 and the proportions of the population were reversed, and the 

 European slaves were five, six, eight, or ten times as nume- 

 rous as their Negro masters, how Jong would such a state 

 of things last? When the blacks form any plots, although 

 tlieir natural apathy and unvarying countenance are favour- 

 able to concealment, they always fail, through treachery or 

 precipitation in commencing operations, or are disconcerted 

 by any resolute opposition, even from very inferior numbers. 

 Some will probably explain in a different manner these 

 remarkable phenomena of the moral and intellectual world, 

 which I have just been considering; they will attempt to 

 prove that these srrongly-marked varieties may have been 

 produced, in races formed originally with equal capabilities, 

 by the external influences of civilization, education, govern- 

 ment, religion, and perhaps other causes. To assert unifor- 

 mity of bodily structure over the whole world would be too 

 repugnant to the testimony of the senses ; equality of mental 

 endowments seems to me hardly a less extravagant tenet. 

 There have, however, been philosophers who even held that 

 all men are born with equal powers ; and that education 



• Travels info the interior Districts of Africa ; Svo. ed. p. 536. 



