These criticisms serve to while away the time, and do no harm unless there should be on board a smart traveller who is bent upon learning all about Africa from the deck of a steamer and then giving his knowledge to the world in a book. The Old Coaster (and the name often includes the captain and officers of the ship) is obsessed with the desire to impart information. The missionary has magazines through which his voice is heard: but the smart traveller is the Old Coaster’s opportunity and he makes the best of it and pours forth a volume of misinformation sufficient to fill the most capacious mental vacuum. The Old Coaster thus employed is not more than half malicious. He sometimes winks at a missionary standing by, as much as to say: “The joke’s on you.” He generally divides missionaries into two classes, _deliberate impostors_ and _well-meaning fools_, generously assuming that the missionary present belongs to the latter class, so that the relation of good-fellowship on board is not necessarily disturbed by the anti-missionary acrimony. One of these travelling critics was so wrought upon by the reported misdoings of missionaries and their destructive influence upon the religion and the morals of the natives that before he reached the Congo he went clean crazy—as witness the following from his book: “What religions furies with unholy rage have demolished those weird gods, and disturbed fervent but unobtruding piety in the exercise of its duties?” It may have been the result of going ashore without an umbrella. I never heard whether this man recovered; but let travellers take warning and not trifle with the dangers of the coast and the Old Coaster. One is impressed by the bewildering inconsistency of the criticisms, so contradictory that if all were published no further answer would be necessary than to cite critic against critic. The more numerous class of critics contend that the native is so morally inferior that he cannot be improved; and a profession of Christian faith only adds to his heathen vices a more disgusting hypocrisy. The other class of critics, less numerous, but more intelligent and reputable, contend, on the contrary, that the native is all right as he is, his pristine morality becomes him; there is no need to improve him and we ought not to try.