Footnote 148: [(return)]
Interest in Liberia by no means completely died. Contributions for education were sometimes made by the representative organizations, and individual students came to America from time to time. When, however, the important commission representing the Government came to America in 1908, the public was slightly startled as having heard from something half-forgotten.
Footnote 149: [(return)]
Ellis in Journal of Race Development, January, 1911.
Footnote 150: [(return)]
Early in 1921 President King headed a new commission to the United States to take up the whole matter of Liberia with the incoming Republican administration.
CHAPTER X
THE NEGRO A NATIONAL ISSUE
1. [Current Tendencies]
It is evident from what has been said already that the idea of the Negro current about 1830 in the United States was not very exalted. It was seriously questioned if he was really a human being, and doctors of divinity learnedly expounded the "Cursed be Canaan" passage as applying to him. A prominent physician of Mobile[151] gave it as his opinion that "the brain of the Negro, when compared with the Caucasian, is smaller by a tenth ... and the intellect is wanting in the same proportion," and finally asserted that Negroes could not live in the North because "a cold climate so freezes their brains as to make them insane." About mulattoes, like many others, he stretched his imagination marvelously. They were incapable of undergoing fatigue; the women were very delicate and subject to all sorts of diseases, and they did not beget children as readily as either black women or white women. In fact, said Nott, between the ages of twenty-five and forty mulattoes died ten times as fast as either white or black people; between forty and fifty-five fifty times as fast, and between fifty-five and seventy one hundred times as fast.
To such opinions was now added one of the greatest misfortunes that have befallen the Negro race in its entire history in America—burlesque on the stage. When in 1696 Thomas Southerne adapted Oroonoko from the novel of Mrs. Aphra Behn and presented in London the story of the African prince who was stolen from his native Angola, no one saw any reason why the Negro should not be a subject for serious treatment on the stage, and the play was a great success, lasting for decades. In 1768, however, was presented at Drury Lane a comic opera, The Padlock, and a very prominent character was Mungo, the slave of a West Indian planter, who got drunk in the second act and was profane throughout the performance. In the course of the evening Mungo entertained the audience with such lines as the following:
Dear heart, what a terrible life I am led!
A dog has a better, that's sheltered and fed.
Night and day 'tis the same;
My pain is deir game: