Another pagan element came with the negro slaves—barbarous men torn from Africa, without culture, imbued with the most degrading superstitions of fetichism, and believers in the power of intercourse with the evil spirits whom they dreaded and invoked. In the utter disregard of their moral welfare which prevailed in the English colonies, no attempt was made in colonial days to eradicate their pagan ideas and to instil Christian principles; on the contrary, efforts were actually made to prevent their instruction and baptism, from an idea that Christianity was incompatible with a condition of slavery. In time the negro slaves and their descendants imitated externally the religious manner of their white masters, but their old fetichism was maintained, with the invocation of evil spirits and attempted intercourse with them. The more Christianity in any form penetrated among these people, the more this pagan element assumed a secret character, until it became, as it is in our day in the West Indies and the South, under the name of vaudoux or voodoo worship, the secret pagan religion of the negro and mixed races. Another pagan element—which cannot be called cryptic, because it meets the full meridian blaze of day, as though it were a thing entitled to existence and protection without limit or check—is the Buddhic worship of the Chinese, with perhaps the less debasing ancient paganism of that nation. Temples arise and pagan worship is carried on before hundreds of altars, chiefly on the Pacific slope. This, with the degraded morals of the heathenism it represents, forms a question difficult to solve, and exciting grave attention not only in California, but in other parts of the country.