340 
TRAVELS IN AFRICA. 
only disadvantages, or, more properly speaking, 
difficulties to their general improvement. It is 
a melancholy truth, that some of the white men 
who were in the first instances sent ostensibly 
to instruct them, were often actuated by dif- 
ferent motives to suffer the lust of interest and 
power to tempt them from the useful discharge 
of the functions entrusted to them 5 — they, too, 
often meet cunning by cunning, treachery by 
treachery, and rapine by rapine : and while they 
thus conducted themselves,^ — why expect the 
Negro to view them in the light of friends and 
Christian regenerators? The Negro absurdly 
thinks the white man his enemy, and in how many 
thousand instances has not the white man rea- 
lised this absurdity into positive and melancholy 
fact? The white inculcates principles whose 
practice he violates, and then he turns round and 
smiles at the incredulity, or affectedly weeps over 
the folly of those who will not yield to the happy 
influence which, forsooth ! he was destined to 
spread amongst them. That this has been too 
much the case cannot be denied. That a different 
conduct now prevails, I can with pleasure assert, 
and I hope for the sake of mankind, that it may 
improve in proportion as the field of our en- 
quiries shall enlarge. This misconduct was the 
beginning of all the evil which followed, and 
those erroneous views destroyed the best inten- 
