a, 1833.]

[Footnote u: This last regulation was laid down by the founders of
the settlement; they apprehended that a state of things might arise
in Africa similar to that which exists on the frontiers of the United
States, and that if the negroes, like the Indians, were brought into
collision with a people more enlightened than themselves, they would be
destroyed before they could be civilized.]

This is indeed a strange caprice of fortune. Two hundred years have now
elapsed since the inhabitants of Europe undertook to tear the negro
from his family and his home, in order to transport him to the shores of
North America; at the present day, the European settlers are engaged in
sending back the descendants of those very negroes to the Continent from
which they were originally taken; and the barbarous Africans have been
brought into contact with civilization in the midst of bondage, and have
become acquainted with free political institutions in slavery. Up to the
present time Africa has been closed against the arts and sciences of the
whites; but the inventions of Europe will perhaps penetrate into those
regions, now that they are introduced by Africans themselves. The
settlement of Liberia is founded upon a lofty and a most fruitful idea;
but whatever may be its results with regard to the Continent of Africa,
it can afford no remedy to the New World.

In twelve years the Colonization Society has transported 2,500 negroes
to Africa; in the same space of time about 700,000 blacks were born in
the United States. If the colony of Liberia were so situated as to be
able to receive thousands of new inhabitants every year, and if the
negroes were in a state to be sent thither with advantage; if the Union
were to supply the society with annual subsidies, *v and to transport
the negroes to Africa in the vessels of the State, it would still be
unable to counterpoise the natural increase of population amongst the
blacks; and as it could not remove as many men in a year as are born
upon its territory within the same space of time, it would fail in
suspending the growth of the evil which is daily increasing in the
States. *w The negro race will never leave those shores of the American
continent, to which it was brought by the passions and the vices of
Europeans; and it will not disappear from the New World as long as it
continues to exist. The inhabitants of the United States may retard
the calamities which they apprehend, but they