“A bill for the improvement of rivers and harbors” should be forthwith passed by the Liberian legislature. A country exporting articles annually amounting to the sum of eight hundred thousand dollars, and this on the increase, might make an appropriation to render landing safe from the ducking in the surf to which one is now exposed. Sharks, in great abundance, are playing about the bars of the rivers, eagerly watching the boats and canoes for their prey. Dr. Prout, a Liberian senator, and several others, have been capsized in boats and fallen victims to these sea-tigers. A full and very interesting description of the geography, climate, productions and diseases of Africa has been published by Dr. J. W. Lugenbeel, late colonial physician, and the last white man who was United States agent in Africa. In devising measures for the benefit of Liberia, one thing was pre-eminently to be kept in view, which was, that the people be prevented from sinking back to become mere Africans. It is believed that this danger was wholly past under the energetic administration of Buchanan, to whom too much praise cannot be awarded. He infused life and spirit into the nation, and brought out such men as Roberts and others, in whose hands we believe the republic is safe. A large majority of the emigrants having been slaves, and dependent on the will and dictation of others, many of them are thereby rendered in a measure incapable of that self-reliance which secures early success in an enterprise of this kind. Slaves do not work like freemen. The question, then, arises--Is this the case because they are slaves, or because they are negroes? Those who have been emancipated in the British territories have hitherto cast no favorable light on this inquiry. They do not now work as they did when compelled to work, although they are free. Neither do the Sicilians, Neapolitans, or Portuguese work as men work elsewhere. There are no men freer than the slavers, who steal children and sell them, in order that they themselves may live in vicious idleness. It is the freeman’s intelligence and his higher motives of action, which produce his virtues.