But this attitude of the natives towards the white man, especially in new tribes, forebodes trouble. There is not much danger of robbery or violence, but there is danger to his moral influence. A kind of communism obtains among them. A man having our “abundance” would divide with the men of his town, all of whom are related to him. If a man hunting in the forest should kill a monkey or a python he will bring it to his town before he cuts it up and it will be divided equally. For this reason it is very hard to buy any game from them; no one person has authority to sell it. Even at the coast and in the old semi-civilized settlements, when a native, after being employed by a white man, returns to his town with his wages he will be expected to assist everybody in the town who happens to want anything and has not the price—and there are always some of them who want to get married and have not succeeded in raising the dowry. So the wages of a hard year’s work are dissipated in less than a month. It is hard, but it is custom. It cannot be denied that the custom fosters an easy-going content and precludes the unhappiness and cruelty of worldly ambition. But, with ambition, energy also and industry are discouraged and a premium is put upon laziness. The tyranny of custom in Africa and other uncivilized lands is not easy for those to realize who have not witnessed it. It is “the only infallible rule of faith and practice.” The people of the interior, when the white man first goes among them, invariably expect him to divide his goods with them just as soon as they understand that he professes to be their friend. Such a profession seems hypocrisy while he keeps his goods. They can yield intellectual assent when he reasons that the white man has a right to his own customs; but in the consideration of a particular custom it still remains that theirs is right and his is wrong; and when they actually see the goods, greed masters reason and they are often enraged. All worldly prosperity in Africa depends upon the possession of proper fetishes. They are therefore quick to conclude that we have very powerful fetishes; and it is inevitable that before long they should conclude that the Bible is the missionary’s fetish. At Efulen, among the Bulu, when we had been there but a short time, a band of men, setting out upon the war-path with their guns upon their shoulders, marched up to our hill and asked if we would give them a Bible to take with them to make their guns shoot straight and procure their success. One day Dr. Good missed a Bible. It had been stolen. He heard nothing of it for a month; after which he was one day walking through a native village where the people, expecting to go to war next day, were preparing a very powerful fetish or “war-medicine” by boiling together in a pot several of their most reliable fetishes; and in the boiling pot he found his Bible.