The Krooman, whose tribes are scattered for eighty miles along the Liberian Coast, is the Bedouin of the African sea. He is the sailor-man and the boat-man for every ship that comes and sails down the Coast. His skill in landing through the surf and passing over bars in his frail canoe is something wonderful. His canoe and himself are one and the same thing; together they glide over the swell of the ocean _with speed and safety, now hidden, now seen_. If capsized he soon rights his boat, rolls in again and paddles away. He is a bird upon the water and a fish in the sea. Always willing and obedient, he is honest and trustworthy. He wants his wages when his contract is up, when he returns to his tribe and invests in another wife. Wives are his treasures; they are the support of his old age. He speaks a little English, of which he is very proud. Some ship-master gives him a fantastic name, as “Draw Bucket” or “Plug of Tobacco,” to which he clings as his badge of honor, and his merits are duly recorded in his “book,” which he receives from his employer and carries around his neck, each succeeding master increasing the wealth of his recommendation. His mother is his great object of reverence; he never ventures to dispute her authority. In this respect he never “comes of age.” If Monrovia, the capital, had not largely increased in wealth and population during these twenty-five years, Liberia had extended her boundaries league by league, each additional possession encroaching upon or destroying some well-known haunt of the slave trader, until for six hundred miles of the adjacent Coast not a slave factory could be found or a slaver get a cargo. In the very nature of things slavery was abhorrent to Liberia. It could not exist within or near her borders. It disappeared by virtue of the expelling force which exists in the power of light and civilization. These two things could not be at the same time in the same place. By this moral alliance with the Powers of the world—this silent partnership, which in the end banished the trade in human beings from the entire Coast of Western Africa; this passive victory over the greatest sin of modern times—by this deed alone she has earned her title to the possession of her territory, and her friends and the friends of humanity have met with more than their reward. An author says, in 1853: “The fact stands acknowledged before the world that Great Britain, after the expenditure of more than one hundred millions of dollars, has failed in suppressing the slave trade on one mile of Coast beyond the limit of her colonies, while Liberia has swept it from nearly four hundred miles of Coast where it existed in its chief strength, liberated 80,000 slaves, and bound by treaties 200,000 natives never to engage in the traffic in their brethren.”