tics of divorce. While we carefully gather statistics that relate to most material and social interests, we have strangely neglected the means of studying this most important subject of the formation and dissolution of the Family. And it is only recently that several of the leading European nations have entered upon this work. By some common arrangement between the general government and the States, if not with foreign countries, this work, of which Mr. Wright has so admirably laid the foundations, as he did several years ago in Massachusetts, should now, as it was then, be followed by a system for the permanent collection of this important material. His earnest remarks on this subject and his account of the points that his Report would have gladly included, if they could have been secured with any reasonable labor, are important suggestions to all citizens, and especially to those directly concerned in legislation. It would be very easy to secure in the contents of all libels very many of these facts. Their classification and study would be invaluable aids to legislation and in sociological study.

Meanwhile it would seem desirable that Congress should consider the wisdom of making the extensive working tables of this Report, which could not be incorporated in the already large volume, and perhaps some further digest of the present issue, the material for a second volume on the subject.

I may possibly hereafter give some account of the general state of marriage and divorce laws in this country and Europe.

EACH Continent has its turn. The interest which, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, turned upon America now turns upon Africa. This is now the continent of great discoveries, of great expectations, of great colonial aspirations; the continent, also, which is exposed to peculiar dangers. One of these dangers threatens from the East, and from Islam; it is the Slave-trade. One threatens from the West, and from Christendom; it is the Liquor-trade. It is hard to say which is the most abominable, and which the most destructive. On the whole, however, the palm of evil may be assigned to the Slave-trade, since this is a force brought upon the people from without. But they are both evil, and only evil, and that continually. Christendom, however, has a conscience which may be educated; Islam has none, for Islam knows of no obligation outside itself, except that of forcible proselytism. But where is the Lavigerie that shall arouse the moral sense of Christendom against itself? Or, rather, where is the Wilberforce of the end of the century, who, as the former shamed Christendom out of a wrong towards Africa which it shared with Islam, will shame it now out of a wrong towards Africa of which Islam is innocent. The two great channels for the introduction of this Christian evil are the two great Western rivers, the Congo and the Niger.

The "Church Missionary Intelligencer" for February, 1887, speaks very fully, and draws an appalling picture of this evil," of the havoc and ruin wrought by this frightfully insidious and unfortunately popular traffic. It may be summed up in the deeply pathetic words of the Rev. James Johnson, native pastor at Lagos, spoken at one of our Committees: 'If this trade goes on, it is only a matter of a few years for myself and my people!' The testimony of Mr. Joseph Thomson, the African traveler, is as follows: On the way out, on board an African trading steamer, he employed himself in noting how many bales or packages of useful articles the merchants of civilized Europe supply to the unhappy Negro, as compared with more baneful articles of trade. . . . At each port of call the eye becomes bewildered in watching the discharge of thousands of cases of gin, hundreds of demijohns of rum, box upon box of guns, untold kegs of gunpowder, myriads of clay pipes, while it seems as if only by accident a stray bale of cloth went over the side.' At one part of his journey he writes: In many districts the wealth and importance of the various villages are measured by the size of the pyramids of empty gin-bottles which they possess.'. . . One opinion is that 60,000 hogsheads of fifty gallons each is the annual consumption in the rivers of Niger, Benin, Brass, New Calabar, Bonny, Opobo, Old Calabar, and the Cameroons; ' in other words, this compressed space lying between 4° and 8° E. long., or say 250 miles of coast, consumes 20,000 tons, or say twenty ships full of 1,000 tons each year.' Writing from Brass River, at the end of 1883, Archdeacon Hamilton says: To give you some faint idea of its extent, one of the National African Company's steamers recently carried 25,000 cases of gin and demijohns of rum, and this was to supply two factories only.' We have quoted these estimates of quantity imported because they are tangible means of calculating the prodigious injury inflicted upon that unhappy land."

The "Intelligencer" continues: "We must pay to the National African Trading Company, now called the Royal Niger Company, a deserved tribute in acknowledging that they have endeavored to restrict this wretched traffic, and that they would have been glad if international regulations had been agreed upon excluding it altogether from the Niger district. Our own government, we may add, is in thorough sympathy with these views. But the chief opponent is Germany. To such proposals she, one of the most protectionist countries in Europe, opposes the argument about the sacred rights of trade. The reason of this is not far to seek. The liquor trade is largely in the hands of Germans, and they naturally bring very strong pressure upon their own Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Their pecuniary interest in the business is nearly four times as great as that of all other nationalities put together."

The present influence of Germany, both in Eastern and in Western Africa, seems to be a very doubtful good. Her watchword in Europe is "Blood and Iron"; her watchword in Africa seems to be, "Blood, Iron, and Rum."

Another ambiguous influence in Africa, as well as in the Pacific, is the attempt, on the part both of Germany and France, to bend general Christianity, in the form of missionary enterprise, into an instrument for the advancement of their own particular national interests, to take the missionaries under their patronage, on condition that they will consider it a part of their duty to preach Germanism or Gallicism, as well as the gospel. In time past it has been fashionable in Germany to

sneer at missionaries; just now it is rather fashionable to compliment them. But the new fashion does not seem to imply any real advance of essential appreciation over the old. The missionaries will be flattered so long as it is hoped that they will be willing to make themselves subordi nate to the government; if it is found that they really recognize the impossibility of serving two masters, and that they are impracticable in working for Christ rather than the Kaiser, this wind of favor will go down as suddenly as it has risen. And all the Protestant missionary societies, at least, although heartily loyal to Germany, seem to be very decided, that it is neither their business to preach Germanism nor to confine themselves to German territory. We wish we could say that the French brethren were quite as free of undue Gallicism. The German government, however, instead of honorably recognizing the universal character of missionary work, seems only too well inclined to rid its territory of all foreign missionaries. In East Africa it is stated that the French priests and nuns are only tolerated until they can familiarize their German successors with the work; Bishop Smythies has received broad hints, which he, however, refuses to take, that he had better contract his lines within British territory, although he began his work before the German advance; the English Baptists on the Cameroons have been worried into surrendering their stations into the reluctant hands of the Basel Society, who hardly know what to do with a people trained so differently from their ways; and the French on the Gaboon have forbidden our American Presbyterians to use any foreign language but French in their schools, which has led to good out of evil by bringing them into joint action with the Paris Society, as this is sending them teachers. With this unamiable, almost brutal chauvinism, the large-heartedness of England in her great colonial empire stands in noble contrast. She welcomes missionaries of any nationality; permits them to teach their people in any language they please, and no more thinks of watching them than of exacting passports of them. It is true, she knows the imperial English will make its way, and that foreign missionaries will soon find it becoming vernacular to themselves, and be glad to have it so. The sins of British administration abroad are great, and none are so conscious of it as Englishmen. But Mr. Charles L. Brace is beyond question to be upheld in his testimony, that English society is in a specifically eminent degree pervaded by the spirit of Christ. That man is no enlightened Christian, and certainly he is no genuine Protestant, who does not pray that England, as well as we, may be saved, abroad and at home, from "all sedition, privy conspiracy, and rebellion," and from all Medean plots that would cut her in pieces, like Pelias, in the mocking assurance of thereby renewing her life. For well-intending zeal sometimes casts behind it a long shadow of insidious malice. Germany, too, who at heart is honest, as her colonial empire waxes older, will lose much of her surly jealousy. When the three great Protestant nations know for what end God has set them on high, then the gospel in its purer form will begin to gather fresh confidence in its advances throughout the world.

The "Intelligencer" remarks: "The aggressive attitude of Mohammedanism in Africa of late years and the activity of the forces of Islam at the present moment are ominous marks in the 'Outlook in Africa.' ... Checked in Europe, checked in Asia, the expiring throes of that huge superstition are convulsing Africa."

The "Intelligencer," while sharply criticising Dr. Blyden's views of

Mohammedanism, remarks, however: "Of one thing we feel assured, and in this we are at one with Dr. Blyden, that Africa for the Africans is no unmeaning cry. It is not impossible that here and there explorers may discover tracts on which Europeans may manage to live with comparative impunity; but it does not follow that, even with modern skill and appliances, these spots will be easily accessible. Residence within the tropics is accompanied with serious risks. The Portuguese have already dwindled to nothing under it, although not Northern Europeans. We doubt permanent impression being made upon Africa by the multitudes of adventurers now swarming into it; deleterious commerce rather than substantial benefit to the Negro bids fair to be the result. Indeed, it seems problematical how far the benevolent efforts to evangelize the interior may not be overdone and vitiated by European cupidity, as they are already by Mohammedan brutality. A still better cry would, in our estimation, be 'Africa by the Africans.' They can cope with the insalubrity of the climate; they can bear the scorching rays of the tropical sun; they know, or ought to know, what is in the heart of their brethren. Evangelization by such means is and must be a slow process; it takes a long time suitably to train agents and to imbue them with that amount of learning and intelligence which would qualify them to be teachers of their brethren. Nor has it been found in practice that all who have been trained are willing to quit civilization for the risks attending life in the interior. Still, if Africa is to be evangelized, Native agency is, so far as man can judge, indispensable for this end."

How far the Europeanized or Americanized black would possess the power of easy acclimatization or easy naturalization in Africa is perhaps somewhat doubtful. Still, it is evident that there must be a deep underlying sympathy, both physical and psychical, which there cannot be between the African and the white, above all the white of Teutonic race. As Goldwin Smith has truly said, they seem separated by almost the diapason of humanity. In the West Indies we used to feel as if we were discharging headless arrows, as we looked into the unresponsive faces which expressed, what the negroes did not hesitate to say: "Buckra and we no one." The spiritual centre of gravity is different in the two races. The vices against which we are most severe in preaching to them are those to which we are least prone; the virtues which we pass over most lightly in presenting to them an ideal are those which they find it easiest to practice. Because he could not turn this childlike, easy-going, loquacious race into driving, taciturn Yankees, we have seen an able, faithful missionary almost as much enraged as if they had broken all the Ten Commandments at once. But, as the "Spectator" has well said, unless the African genius can be Christianized, the race will continue to present only an imitative, parasitical Christianity, which, whenever the tutelage of the white superiors is slackened, will begin to gravitate irresistibly back towards heathenism. There is not the slightest necessity that the Prophet of Africa should be a Moslem. He may well be a Christian of the deepest sort. But he must be an African Christian. His rebukes and his consolations must both be those of a brother, not those of a conscientious taskmaster endeavoring to force the people into a mould of character into which they can never enter.

The negro Mohammedans of West Africa have been spoken of as much more simple-minded and friendly to Christians than Moslems in general. The following account of an interview with them, at least, is

"We

agreeable to this opinion. It is from the "Intelligencer" for May, 1888. The account is given by the Rev. W. Allan, who had accompanied the Bishop of Sierra Leone to the Temne country, in the interior. have all been to pay a visit to the palace of the Timneh king, a Mohammedan. He happens himself to be away at present, but we were received by the official called the king's father, without whom he cannot act, and also by the king's wives. I was introduced by the Bishop as the Church Missionary Society in a concrete form. The Bishop, through the interpreter, spoke very straightforwardly, asking for the king's direct encouragement in the work, and received most favorable replies. There was a Mohammedan priest there, in a prominent position, and he professed himself equally friendly, and all alike declared their willingness for the people to become Christians, and undertook to send the children to our Mission school although there is a Mohammedan school, kept by this very priest. The king's father promised that they would all attend an open-air service which we said we would hold to-day outside the king's house; and the priest said, as the Christian religion was older than the Mohammedan religion, it was heavier and must prevail; if the Testament contained good things which the Koran did not, they would be glad to know and believe them; they were only stumbling in the dark; the missionary had light, and they wished to benefit by it.... There were as many as forty present, and our interview lasted a long time. It was a very interesting visit, but of its real importance I do not feel able to judge. There was not a trace of Mohammedan bigotry visible, or the slightest indication of hostility to the gospel." The service was held, attended by about two hundred, including the king's father, who was very energetic in his expressions of approbation, declaring that it would become them all in future to see that the missionary school and preaching were more effective among them.

The Rev. W. Allan also gives the following account of his visit to the Niger Delta: "I found Mr. Robinson and the Henry Venn awaiting me, with steam up, and fuel, provisions, and other necessaries on board. We started at once for Brass, with its three hundred communicants, where I had the pleasure of seeing the admirable iron church which the native converts have erected for themselves, and towards which Chief Sambo alone contributed 480l., besides handsome church furniture obtained direct from England, and the native pastor, as well as the pastor's house and the premises for which our Secretary is negotiating, in order that he may have a roof on dry land to cover him, which at present is not the case.

"The next morning we weighed anchor at four A. M., and proceeded through pestilential creeks till night, when we anchored in as wide a portion of the creek as possible, in order to give as wide a berth as we could to the cannibal tribes who inhabit the shores, and amongst whom no missionary work has yet been done. Starting again at four A. M. on the Saturday, we threaded more of the fragrant creeks until about two P. M., when we arrived at Bonny, and before long were on shore, and under the roof of the Ven. Archdeacon Crowther and Mrs. Crowther, of both of whom I am thankful to say that I continually heard a good report in the course of my journeys, even from the censorious and negro-hating steamboat captains and officers. We were soon joined by Mr. Packer, who has no other home than accommodation kindly granted in a floating trading hulk. He was looking remarkably well, and seems to be much appre