Liberia came into existence as a nation preceded by no war; she was born of no internecine strife, but in harmony with her mission she declared herself free and independent, and was gracefully acknowledged as such by the Great Powers of the world—the mother country alone hesitating to receive as an equal her neglected child—and in an humble and lowly manner, becoming her color and condition, she peacefully and quietly took her back seat in the family of nations. I say that Liberia has a government apparently stable. Compare it, in the twenty-eight years of its existence, with the government of France in its throes with monarchism, pseudo republicanism, imperialism, and communism—“everything by turns and nothing long”—or with that of Spain in its dynastic revolutions. It seems to me that the people of Liberia are in the hands of a guiding Power, which carries them hither and thither, always safely, to the end that they may become the arbiters of the fate of their race, the peaceful conquerors of a new world. I know it is the fashion to deride such pietistic notions, to sneer at such unscientific theories; but, my friends, as I grow older, as I watch the ebbing and flowing of the human tides, as I read of human destiny moulded to serve Divine ends, I feel how insignificant men are in themselves, how great they are in the hands of God. I say that the government has, in the main, been well administered. The _world_, so called, _i. e._, the greed, the superstition, the bigotry, the clannish conservatism, added to the thoughtlessness and the indifference of the world, combine to crush out these abstract notions, these impracticable ideas of the mere philanthropist, to deny the capacity of certain “inferior” races for self-government, to prognosticate failures, to come in with malevolent predictions, to settle the whole matter finally with complacent “I told you so.”