AFRICAN EMIGRATION.
—It appears that the “information from Liberia,” said to have been received by “the Department of State,” already widely circulated, was not in any sense an official publication, nor is the name or standing of the author given.
—Rev. Dr. George W. Samson, for forty years a resident of Washington, for twelve years President of Columbian College, and for sixteen years a member of the Executive Committee of the American Colonization Society, has written a weighty reply to these statements in the Boston Traveller. In it he shows the economical planting, the rapid progress, the fertility of the soil, the intelligence and educational facilities of the colony, by the testimony of U. S. naval officers and other distinguished witnesses.
—Fifty-two colored emigrants sailed for Liberia recently in the bark Liberia. They were forwarded by the American Colonization Society. Three clergymen were among the cabin passengers, one of whom goes to the Boporo Mission in the interior. The majority of those emigrating are mechanics and farmers. Many of them are members of Christian churches. They are comfortably quartered on board, and have more conveniences than is usual on emigrant vessels. The American Colonization Society has made a contract with the agents of the vessel, who agree to carry adults for $50 and children for $25. This amount includes everything required during the voyage, and the Liberian Government insures their support for at least six months after their arrival. Each single immigrant receives ten acres of land, and the head of a family twenty-five acres. Ex-President Warner, recently elected Vice-President of the Republic, is the Society’s agent to receive the emigrants, and under his charge they will be kept until they can support themselves. The Society has sent many parties before this and reports the applications as so numerous that space cannot be found to accommodate them.
—A very different enterprise, apparently, is the Liberia Exodus Association, which failed to provide the steamship which was to be ready December 15th. Says Mr. Scarborough, an intelligent colored man connected with Wilberforce University:
I regard the Liberia Exodus Association as another Credit Mobilier affair on a small scale. We judge of an undertaking by the character of the men engaged in it. Now, it does not require a profundity of knowledge to tell who and what these men are; what has been their past history, what it is now, and what it will probably be in the future. All these we can pretty well determine. It is stated on good authority that a petition will be sent to Congress praying for aid; the exact amount is not stated. However, I am confident that I express the feelings of hundreds of the better-thinking colored citizens when I say that Congress should make no appropriation for any such pell-mell movement. If Congress wishes to make an appropriation for the negro, let it make it with the restrictions that it shall be used to pay off the deficit caused by the sinking of the Freedmen’s Savings Bank, or for the purchasing of lands and outfits in the great West, that the negro may wend his way thither, build up and utilize the hitherto barren country. In South Carolina, it is said, thousands are selling or letting their little farms and homes by way of preparation for leaving America; men, women and children all have the African mania. My advice to these people now is this: To pay no attention to these fair promises; if they have sold their homes, buy them back if possible; if they have leased their farms, rent others till the lease expires and then return to their own; or, if this is not desirable, seek homes in the great West, in the country that gave us birth, forgetting color, race or condition, only to rise above it.
—As bearing on the question of a general or large transportation of ignorant and untrained men to Liberia, were it possible, we quote from Prof. Blyden in a late number of the Methodist Quarterly Review. He, in speaking of unskilled labor, says:
In Liberia, there is no lack of the lower kinds of unskilled labor supplied by the numerous aborigines who throng the settlements. The immigrant who comes from America is at once made a proprietor. He has land given him by law, but having no capital to employ labor, he must enter, single-handed, upon the work of subduing the forest, and with all the efforts he may put forth, it is with the utmost difficulty that he ever rises above a hand-to-mouth existence. Hence, very often men owning their twenty-five acres of land, pressed by their necessities, prefer to leave it a wilderness and go to the arduous and, for new comers, perilous labor of shingle and lumber getting, or enter the employ of men who may be able to keep them from starving, but hardly able to give them a start toward self-support on their own lands.
When it is remembered that Prof. Blyden is a citizen of Liberia and knows whereof he speaks, there will be no reason to doubt the truth of the above statement.
—One of the workers in the Liberia movement met a wise, old colored man in Shreveport, La. He was describing the great benefits the negro would enjoy by emigrating, and told him that there the negro did not have to work; bread and sugar trees covered the forests, and bananas, cocoanuts, pine-apples, lemons, and all the tropical fruits, grew everywhere. “Dat’s ’nough of dat story,” said the old man; “dat ain’t so, kase if it was, de white man would a went dar long ago, and the niggers neber would hah known nuffin ’bout it.”