During the year 1866, not less than six hundred tons of cam-wood, twelve hundred tons of palm-oil, and two hundred tons of palm-kernels, were included in the exports of the Republic. And these articles of commercial enterprise and wealth are capable of being increased to almost any extent.
The Colonization Society, under whose auspices the colony of Liberia was instituted, was, as the writer verily believes, inimical to the freedom of the American slaves, and therefore brought down upon it the just condemnation of the American abolitionists, and consequently placed the people in a critical position; I mean the colonists. But from the moment that the Liberians in 1847 established a Republic, unfurled their national banner to the breeze, and began to manage their own affairs, we then said, “Cursed be the hand of ours that shall throw a stone at our brother.”
Fortunately, for the colony, many of the emigrants were men of more than ordinary ability; men who went out with a double purpose; first, to seek homes for themselves and families out of the reach of the American prejudice; second, to carry the gospel of civilization to their brethren. These men had the needed grit and enthusiasm.
Moles, Teage, and Johnson, are names that we in our boyhood learned to respect and love. Roberts, Benson, Warner, Crummell, and James, men of more recent times, have done much to give Liberia her deservedly high reputation.
With a government modelled after our own constitution and laws, that are an honor to any people, and administered by men of the genius and ability which characterizes the present ruling power, Liberia is destined to hold an influential place in the history of nations. Her splendid resources will yet be developed; her broad rivers will be traversed by the steamship, and her fertile plains will yet resound to the thunder of the locomotive. The telegraph wire will yet catch up African news and deposit it in the Corn Exchange, London, and Wall Street, New York.
That moral wilderness is yet to blossom with the noblest fruits of civilization and the sweetest flowers of religion. She will yet have her literature, her historians and her poets. Splendid cities will rise where now there are nothing but dark jungles.