PREFATORY LETTER, xix 



ther, soul as well as body, out of elements undistinguishable 

 from our own. We may look at the fantastical decorations 

 of his outer person; such, for example, as the head-dresses 

 figured in the Missionary Travels. There is not one among 

 them comparable in absurdity to those monstrous stacks of 

 perfumed and powdered hair that were worn last century by 

 the 'fairest daughters of England. There is no end to the 

 fooleries of fashion, whatever may be the condition of society, 

 however high or low may be its grade. Even in this much 

 boasted nineteenth century, were a man dropped amongst us, 

 after a few years of absence from the earth, he might well 

 think that a vile wizard had transformed the lower half of 

 our fair sisters into the semblance of some ponderous Pachy- 

 derm; and that they were doing their best to conceal this 

 monstrous metamorphosis by hoops of iron and ugly outworks 

 of flounce and furbelow. 



If Africa have its wretched slave-gangs; we once had 

 slaves in England, and sent them in gangs to the markets of 

 civilized Europe. If Africa have now its miserable ordeals ; 

 we once had our trials by ordeal, long after we had risen on 

 the social scale very far above the rank of savages. Nay, 

 within my memory, an accused Englishman claimed the right 

 of appeal to wager of battle — as one of the surviving remnants 

 of a legal form of ordeal. How long is it since our statute- 

 book ceased to be blackened by capital enactments against 

 witchcraft; and our jail-deliveries disgraced by horrible acts 

 of torture inflicted (after all the solemn formalities of law) 

 upon poor decrepit unoffending English women? If Africa 

 have its quacks, we too have a plentiful crop from the same 

 vile seed. If we have no rain-doctors (and the fickle ele- 

 ments would spoil their practice were they here), we have 

 our rain-prophets, and our weather-wise impostors, in plenty; 

 who year by year know how to sell their atmospheric oracles 

 to thousands. And as to charms and other credulous fooleries 

 of the poor African ; we can surely match him in our table- 



4—2 



