Like all government intended for the benefit and protection of the governed, Ukuku, when it happened to throw its power on the side of right, was occasionally an apparent blessing. It could end tribal quarrels and proclaim and enforce peace where no individual chief or king would have been able to accomplish the same result. In this connection I quote from an editorial in a Sierra Leone newspaper: "Much of the ideas of our western civilization as to native African institutions have been crude and uninformed, based on misconception and a predisposition to consider such institutions as an outcome of barbarism and savagery, to be treated with unmitigated contempt. But as the light of modern researches is reflected on the question by sympathetic students who have brought an unprejudiced mind to bear on the subject, if haply they might discover the hidden truths underlying the fabric which age, custom, and intellect have combined to construct into a national system, it is becoming more and more apparent to those who are interested in the material progress of Africa and the Africans and who are believers in the fact that native races have a civilization of their own capable of development and expansion on right lines, that the study of such questions should be intelligently and scientifically pursued, and with a purpose to help those concerned in their onward progress towards the attainment of moral, social, and intellectual liberty. "That [some] native [governmental] institutions have wielded, and are wielding, a power for good in the several communities belonging to each distinctive tribe, is a fact that cannot be disputed or contested, in the past as well as in the present. The Aro of the Yorubas [in the Niger Delta], the Porroh of the Mendis [of Sierra Leone], and the Bondo of the mixed mass who inhabit Sherbro-land, have and exercise judicial functions exemplary and disciplinary in their effects. By their means law and order are observed to such an extent that many of the unrestrained and rowdy outbursts cowardly indulged in by so-called civilized communities and people are practically unknown. "These institutions are connected with and govern the agencies that work in the sociology of all communities, such as the marriage laws; the relation of children to parents and of sex to sex; social laws; the position of eldership and the deference to be paid to age and worth; native herbs and medicines, and the duties of the native doctor to the other members of the community."