They themselves seem to have had a half-prophetic dread of this absorption. In her earliest days Elijah Johnson, amidst the dangers of a threatened attack by the surrounding savage tribes, being offered a force of marines from a British man-of-war if he would only cede a few feet of land on which to plant a British flag, promptly refused, saying, “We want no flagstaff put up here that would cost more to get down again than it would to whip the natives.” _Now this danger is at their very doors._ A few years ago there was a rage for “internal improvements” in Liberia; $500,000 were borrowed in London, which netted $425,000. This sum was again reduced by paying the first two years’ interest in advance, and then from the remainder was deducted the agents’ commissions, until finally it reached Monrovia in gold and useless goods to the aggregate amount of $200,000, and this residue has disappeared without an “internal improvement.” To use a slang phrase, “We know how it is ourselves.” From Canada to California every town and village in the country has gone through the same experience, but poor Liberia, with an income at the most of $100,000 a year, is unable to pay either principal or interest. She lies at the mercy of her bondholders. England, with her lion’s paw upon the trade of the world, would, and perhaps _will_ eventually, assume the debt for the trifling consideration of possession. It is in fact a mortgage upon the integrity of Liberia. Already England occupies 1,500 miles of the Coast; already she hems in Liberia, the most coveted of all, on the north; already the British trader is encroaching upon her boundaries and stealing in behind her settlements. Slowly and surely the process of absorption will go on to its consummation as the anaconda swallows the kid. England herself is almost powerless to stay it unless we intervene. I don’t mean by intervention that cold-blooded indifferentism which measures every national emotion with the line and plummet of international law, which restrains within the bounds of obsolete diplomacy every beat of the nation’s heart. I mean the warm, sympathetic intervention which will say to all the world, that, happen what may, the _United States of America will see to it that no power on earth shall obliterate from the map of Africa the infant Republic of Liberia_.