An episode in the history of African colonization which may be most fitly mentioned here, in relation to the effects of the slave trade on West Africa, is the foundation of the negro Republic of Liberia by private agencies in the United States. When the Napoleonic wars were over and the great western expansion of the United States was beginning, the question—not yet wholly solved—arose: what was to be done with the Negro or Mulatto as citizen, as a free man with every right to a vote? There were already many manumitted negroes in North America and in the West Indies, and their position in the first half of the 19th century was an indeterminate one. As it commenced to be irksome, from the social and ethical problems it involved, an attempt was made (1816-20) by certain benevolent and political societies to solve it by deporting all discontented free negroes and negroids back to Africa, where they might make a new home for themselves and even enjoy the privileged position that the one-eyed man occupies amongst the blind. Great Britain, as we have already seen, had much the same problem to face at an earlier date and answered it by the foundation of Sierra Leone. At first it seemed simplest for the various missionary and philanthropic societies to dump their free negroes on the coast of Sierra Leone (in 1820); but the Governor of that colony seems to have received the proposal rather coldly. The fact was that at Sierra Leone (almost a failure from the “repatriation” point of view) we were beginning to find that it is scarcely easier to plant a Black colony in any part of inhabited Africa than to found a White one; you have to displace some other people, and such indigenes, if asked to choose, would rather make way for an intrusive white element than a band of foreign negroes. And when such negroes or negroids come from America or Asia they resist the African climate, or rather its germ diseases, not much better than Europeans. Probably the Sierra Leone Government had begun by 1820 to think more of the interests of the really indigenous, native tribes of that “colony,” than of the woes and welfare of American ex-slaves.