"The negro in Africa was, and is yet, in largest measure ’Without law except in its very crudest form’—’no law at all as we conceive it’—’in densest savage ignorance’—’no writing, no literature, no arts, no sciences’—’some development of perceptive and imitative faculties and of memory, but little of the higher faculties of abstract reasoning’—’in temperament intensely emotional, fitful, passionate, cruel’—’without self-control in emotional crises, callously indifferent to suffering in others, easily aroused to ferocity by sight of blood or under great fear’—’particularly deficient in strength of will, stability of purpose and staying power’—’dominated by impulse, void of foresight, unable to realize the future or restrain present desire’—’indolent, lazy, improvident, neglectful, happy-go-lucky, innately averse to labour or to care’—’given to uncleanness’—’an eater of snakes and snails, cannibal, eating his own dead’—’vilely superstitious, a maker of human sacrifices, charm-wearing, fetich-worshipping’—’of a religion grossly anthropomorphic, explaining all natural phenomena by a reference to evil spirits’—’his religion has no connection with morality, nothing to do with man’s relation to man’—’thieving his beloved pastime, deception more common than theft’—’national character strongly marked by duplicity’—’lying habitually and thinking lying an enviable accomplishment’—’a more thorough and unhesitating liar than one of these negroes is not to be found anywhere’—’cruelly obliges his women to work’—’sensual, polygamous, unchaste’—’buying and selling his women’—’valuing his daughter’s virginity solely as a marketable commodity’—’accounting adultery simply as a trespass upon a husband’s property rights, and seduction and rape as a violence only to parent’s property in daughters as destroying their marketable value’—’wifehood is but an enslavement to the husband’s will’—’no conception of chastity as a virtue’—’of strong sexual passions’—’a devoted worshipper at the shrine of his phallic gods’—’sexual instincts dominate even the most public festivals, and public dances exhibit all degrees of sex suggestion.’ "Those in short, Mr. President, are some of the horrible details of the bestial degradation of the west-coast Africans, from whom our slave-marts were recruited almost to the time of the Civil War, and who, says Keane, are ’the very worst sweepings of the Sudanese plateau,’ and, Ellis says, are ’the dregs and offscourings of Africa.’ "Such was the negro in Africa. What he is in America, only my people know. He has been the gainer at all points, the loser at none, because of his enforced residence here and his bondage to Southern white men: and yet that awful picture of the negro in Africa is so startlingly familiar to one who has spent his life in the South that he examines it closely with something of fear.