378 Timehri. 
first contact for good between the European and the African inhabitants 
of our colony coming through Christianity, it can be easily understood 
how docile the emancipated blacks were, how devoted to their Christian 
instructors, how ready to regard them as ideals in everything. This 
largely accounts for the fact that the negro descendants attach the- 
importance they do to church-going, neglecting domestic welfare now-a- 
days to the often empty display of church attendance during the busy 
days of the week for the other sections of our heterogeneous population. 
As the emancipated slaves were uneducated and unsophisticated, the 
knowledge they would most largely imbibe came from the fountain of 
preachers of the Gospel, and some of the inertia and thriftlessness of the 
present generation is certainly the result of their early Christian instrue- 
tions. Misapplied quotations from the bible flow all too readily from our 
creole negroes, and tend to weaken the influences of real Christianity on 
the rising generation, surrounded as it is by hordes of non-Christian 
East Indians, whose worldly progress strikes their attention all the 
time. How often is not the extravagance of the present genera- 
tion of the black and coloured population defended with such a 
quotation as “ Cast thy bread upon the waters, and after many days thou 
shalt find it?” If the Christian precepts given negroes of a generation 
or two ago had been accompanied by numerous concrete illustrations of 
Christian conduct and character among European inhabitants ; if moral 
turpitude had brought any punishment on the ruling classes ; if ‘the lead- 
ing men in the community had more generally established families in the 
orthodox manner, there would be far less unfavourable criticism of our 
people than there is. The Dutch system of legitimising offspring 
certainly does seem most in accordance with the spirit of Christianity 
than the ostracism of them, and to that system is due the fact that many 
of the well-to-do and influential families of the colony in the post- 
Emancipation generations have been coloured. But also the institution 
of marriage was shaken by it, for negresses found it more profitable and 
advantageous to be mothers of children who stood a chance of recognition 
and receiving an heritage from the well-to-do sires than to be married to 
their own equals. Customs die hard ; therefore, while the British suecess- 
ors to the Dutch do not so thoughtfully legitimise such offspring, yet 
they naturally give a preference to the coloured, creating a dangerous 
problem for unborn generations to solve. [ would, however, that this 
subject could have been treated without regard and reference to such deli- 
cate matters, But enough; it has been shown how the negroes came 
under the kindly influences of Christian Missionaries, and how too they 
were not assisted to develop a robust Christian character. 
Having now got beyond the early days of Emaneipation, let us see 
along what lines the negroes marched upward. The teachers in the 
schools of the colony had to be imported, and they had to share with the 
ministers of religion in moulding the character, and, to a great extent, the 
destinies of the inasses. It must be remembered that these were times 
antecedent to [870 and the revolutionising of Elementary Education in 
