Along the streets and by-ways of Monrovia are to be seen the ordinary variety of human beings, young and old, rich and poor, sick and well. You note the absence of grogshops and the presence of churches. Like pilgrims as they are, or were, the prevailing and controlling sentiment of the community is a religious one. To land upon a foreign shore, to cut one’s self off from kith and kin, to plunge into a wilderness, needs faith absolute, vital, in the personality of God and in Divine protection. Add to this the emotional character of the negro and you have the ordinary Liberian; law-abiding and, from his nature and race, indolent, timid, willing to be helped, loth to help himself. I do not mean to compare this colonist with the great domineering, self-asserting, self-dependent Anglo-Saxon, who bullies and conquers and rules wherever he emigrates, but I do mean to say that Liberia and its inhabitants will compare, and favorably, too, with the towns and the people scattered over Central and South America and Mexico, settled by the Spaniard, the Italian, and the Frenchman. Go where you will in these countries you see the same evidences of indolence, the same apparent lack of progress, yet these people _are_ prospering in their way, gradually but surely reaching a higher plane, and so I contend are the Liberians. Remember, the Liberians were _poor_ even to abject poverty, they had received no inheritance but the badge of their servitude, they were ignorant—the law in this free country of ours had taken care to keep them so—painfully ignorant, not only of the common principles of law by which they were to construct a government, but of the common principles of life by which they were to live. God measures people for Himself. He is patient because He is Eternal. Fifty years in the life of a nation born under such adverse circumstances, struggling under poverty and obliquy—predicted a failure by the prophets of caste, checked and thwarted by the priests and politicians of conservatism, unaided, uncheered, born in a wilderness, surrounded, hemmed in by barbarism while just emerging from barbarism itself—fifty years in the life of such a nation is but a moment of time in the Providence of God. Let us then endeavor in our imperfect way to imitate God’s patience and wait while we hope and pray.