THE POISON ORDEAL SET ASIDE. 551 



who is, get the use of this power to enforce any claim, just or unjust, or wreak 

 out his malice. This instrument of oppression is gradually decaying, and 

 the 'reign of law' in a more righteous form will by degrees take its place. 



"In connection with this I may notice another step in advance, in the 

 abolition of substitution in the case of capital punishment. Formerly, an 

 individual having forfeited his life by breach of Egbo law could give one of 

 his own people to die in his room, or purchase a victim for execution, and 

 Egbo, having drunk blood, was satisfied. This custom is now abolished; 

 every one must answer for his own deed — a happy change, which will tend 

 to make the Egbo code less bloody. A formal pledge to abolish it, I may 

 state, was given in writing to the representatives of the British Government, 

 who, it is but right to say, have always been ready to second our efforts to 

 induce Calabar to do away with its customs of blood. 



" The heads of the country have laid aside the poison ordeal in the 

 adm i n i stration of justice. The people, in the depth of their ignorance not 

 knowing God, did not recognise His hand in the visitation of sickness or 

 death, but ' living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another,' on 

 such an occurrence attributed it to the malice of some one, wrought out by 

 the dreaded power of witchcraft or wizardy, and the individual on whom sus- 

 picion fixed itself, or whom the juju man on being consulted accused, was 

 subjected to the ordeal. The method of administering it was to pound the 

 esere, a kind of bean, throw it into water, and make the accused drink it. If 

 the stomach rejected the poisonous draught, he was acquitted ; if not rejected, 

 it was sure to issue in death, and the accused was held for ever guilty. Many 

 perished through this superstition ; but now, even the appeal to the ordeal by 

 individuals anxious to vindicate themselves from suspicion or charge of evil, is 

 discountenanced. 



" An effective breach is made in that most unnatural of their customs, 

 infanticide. They are desirous of having a numerous offspring, and in his 

 prayer which the patriarch of the town made on sacrificing the goat to Ekpo 

 before the palaver-house to provide an Egbo feast, he supplicated that chil- 

 dren might be given them, that their town might increase. The dark super- 

 stition which Satan had taught them led them in certain cases to destroy their 

 infants, and the strongest feeling which Gfod has implanted in the human 

 breast, that of the love of the mother for her new-born babe, was turned by 

 it into hatred and loathing. Children, rescued from the terrible doom to 

 which this superstition devoted them, are now growing up amongst us ; and 

 though the crime, I am sorry to say, is still too often committed, it no longer 

 has the force of a country custom, the observance of which must be observed 

 in its integrity. 



" The practice of human sacrifice for the dead, which ever filled the land 

 with blood, has for several years been abolished. The immediate occurrence 



