Lovedale Missionary Institute, South Africa, is said to be the busiest industrial college in the world. During the session which closed with 1879, there were in all 393 pupils of both sexes, many of them boarders, who paid in fees £1,006, beside £510 still due. Livingstonia and Blantyre sent 6 pupils; 19 came from Natal; 11 from the country of the Barolongs. The carpenter had 30 apprentices and journeymen under him; the wagon-maker 8;the blacksmith 5; the printer 4; the bookbinder 2. On the farm were raised 1,054 bags of corn, beans, potatoes and wheat.
Twenty-one students, of whom eleven were Kaffir certificated-schoolmasters, were under theological instruction. Dr. Stewart thinks the home churches will hardly continue the present number of missionaries beyond the lifetime of those now in the field, and that the work will be done by a native ministry.
A “Livingstonia Central African Company,” for promoting legitimate traffic among the natives, has been organized by a society of gentlemen interested in the civilization of the “Dark Continent” and in the development of its resources. Direct communication is to be opened with Central Africa, and a road has already been constructed a distance of sixty miles around the cataracts of the Shiré, which, connecting with a line of steamers, will constitute a line of 800 miles from the coast. Two Christian gentlemen of Edinburgh, Messrs. John and Frederick Moir, are at the head of the company. It is to be no less a missionary than a commercial enterprise, and there is every reason for believing that in both respects it will prove a success. The natives are becoming fully awake to the advantages of the extensive and solid business facilities possessed by the company, whose future will be watched with great interest.
The West African Reporter, of Sierra Leone, in announcing changes in the officers and probably in the location of the Liberia College, (Dr. Blyden having been appointed President; and the trustees, leave being given by the legislature, having voted to co-operate with the American Board in a plan to remove the college further into the interior,) expresses itself strongly in regard to the injury done to natives who have been sent to Europe to receive their education. It sums the result thus:
“We find our children, as a result of their foreign culture—we do not say in spite of their foreign culture—but as a result of their foreign culture—aimless and purposeless for the race—crammed with European formulas of thought and expression, so as to astonish their bewildered relatives. Their friends wonder at the words of their mouth. But they wonder at other things besides their words. They are the Polyphemus of civilization—huge, but sightless—cui lumen ademptum.”
To some extent the same holds true of negroes from the South, educated in the North for work in their old homes.
Onondaga and Oneida Indians.—There are in the State of New York eight Indian reservations, aggregating 86,336 acres of land, a little less than 18 acres to each of the 5,093 Indians who occupy them. These lands are held by tribal and not individual titles. A few of these Indians have become thrifty farmers, but the most of them are idle and poor; probably one-half are still pagans. A bill has been introduced into the Legislature to abolish, with consent of the Indians, the treaty of 1788, and distribute these lands in severalty to these people. This would end the fatal communal system, which has proved in this, as it must in all cases, so deadly to all prosperity. Each Indian would thus become, under the laws of the State, a land-owner, and amenable to the laws on the same footing as other citizens.