PIONEER MISSIONARIES. 559 



produce the impression that it is not pre-eminently unhealthy. Its native 

 people — in this region at least — are a weak and short-lived race. The ' bush ' 

 has conquered them. They seem helpless in the presence of the rank vege- 

 tation of the jungle and the forest. Too few to possess their own land, they 

 have not the industry, intelligence, and vigour that are necessary to subdue 

 the earth, and make it minister to their own uses and those of other coun- 

 tries beyond the merest fraction of its possibilities. Except the palm, whose 

 sap is their favourite drink, and a few cocoa-nuts, our natives plant no trees. 

 The Elais Guineensis — the oil palm — which is the wealth of the region, has 

 never been cultivated or even planted by their hands. Europeans are com- 

 peting with one another for the seven or eight tons of produce obtained from 

 this river. There are thousands of acres covered with useless vegetation, 

 which might be planted with palm-trees so as to increase that produce ; but 

 the people laugh at the suggestion that they should plant them. This shows 

 the utter want of industry, intelligence, and docility on the part of the peo- 

 ple. And their region cannot be bettered in climate until a new era of 

 intelligence and industry dawn upon it. 



" If it be among the divine purposes that this most debased and grovel- 

 ling race shall become a Christian people, and that this land shall smile with 

 homes of purity, and goodness, and peace, how otherwise can the purpose 

 pass into fact than by our facing the present peril, and going among its 

 populations with that truth of the gospel by which the Spirit of God works 

 His miracles of mercy ? 



"I look upon European and American missionaries on this coast as 

 pioneers. Our enterprise could not, in the nature of things, be originated by 

 its barbarous tribes, without this aggressive foreign agency. And the day is 

 not yet come when the freed Africans of America and of the West Indies may 

 take the work in hand, and do it as it ought to be done. Let them come — 

 men and means — in adequate numbers and fitness, and amount, and we will 

 gladly give them the vantage we have gained, and bid them God-speed. But 

 we must see them, and measure their promise, and gauge their fitness in 

 mental and moral thew and sinew for the warfare, before we can feel justi- 

 fied in giving over to them the conduct of an enterprise that involves such 

 momentous issues for God's glory and man's salvation. And therefore our 

 own Church and the other Churches into whose hands Christ has put the 

 commencement of this evangelisation of Africa must renew rather than relax 

 their efforts, and send the fittest men to the field, and use the best methods 

 to preserve them and make their agency effective. 



" The difficulties we have referred to should have no effect, except that of 

 making us the more docile to the teaching of experience. We who spend our 

 lives here, and risk them for the kingdom of Christ, are not the silly fools 

 that some insinuate we are. The Christian Churches that send us hither with 



