“But the difficulties multiply. Now a hydra-headed monster gapes upon our missionary, of most frightful aspect, and as tenacious of life as that fabled monster of the ancient poets. It is _polygamy_. He finds to his grief and surprise, that every man has as many wives as he can find money to buy. He must give them all up but one, if he would be a Christian. But will he give them up? Not easily. He will give up almost any thing before he will give up his wives. They are his slaves, in fact; they constitute his wealth. And then it is difficult, not to say impossible, to persuade him that it is not somehow morally wrong to put them away. ‘Me send woman away?—where she go to?—what she do?’ This I consider the hugest difficulty with which Christianity has to contend in the conversion of this people, and makes me think that she must look mainly to the rising generation. “But here, too, a difficulty arises. The female children are contracted away—are sold, in fact—by their parents while they are yet very young, often while they are infants; and if the missionary would procure them for his schools, he must pay the dower—some fifteen or twenty dollars. “But our missionary finds that the whole social and domestic organization of these people is opposed to the pure, chaste, and comely spirit of the Gospel, and that, to succeed in this holy work, it must not only be changed, but revolutionized—upturned from the very foundation. Is there no difficulty here? Are habits and customs, so long established and so deeply rooted, to be given up without a struggle? The native people, both men and women, go almost stark naked, and they love to go so—and are not abashed in the presence of people better dressed; they eat with their hands, and dip, and pull, and tear, with as little ceremony and as little decency as monkeys, and they love to eat so; they sleep on the bare ground, or on mats spread on the ground, and they love to sleep so; the men hunt or fish, or lounge about their huts, and smoke their pipes, and chat, and sleep, while their wives, _alias_ their slaves, tend and cut and house their rice—cut and carry home their wood—make their fires, fetch their water, get out their rice, and prepare their ‘chop,’—and all, even the women, love to have it so. And to all the remonstrances of the missionary, they oppose this simple and all-settling reply. ‘This be countryman’s fash.’ They seem incapable of conceiving that your fash is better than theirs, or that theirs is at all defective. Your fash, they will admit, may be better for you, but theirs is better for them. So the natives of Cape Palmas have lived, in the very midst of the colonists, for some twenty years, and they are the same people still, with almost no visible change.”