Many attempts are made to determine the ability of the Negro by what he has done in Africa and in Latin America. He has not lifted himself out of barbarism in his own continent, though he has founded large and prosperous states carried on solely by Africans; and Winston Spencer Churchill, from his recent visit to the heart of Africa, sees reason to predict that he will form permanent communities. The curses of Africa for centuries have been inhuman superstitions and devastating slave raids, dignified by the name of wars, for which the white and Arab slave dealers are partly responsible. Torture of captives, sack of towns, murder of infants, coffles of slaves marching to a market, are not so far away from the practice of European nations two or three centuries ago that we can brand them as evidence of irreclaimable barbarism. Pappenheim at Magdeburg and Lannes at the takings of Saragossa could match many of the worst crimes of the African impi on a raid, or of a white agent of the Congo Free State collecting his rubber tax. Protestant Germany and England left off the cruelest treatment of supposed witches only about two centuries ago. Cannibalism and the slave trade seem now on their last legs in Africa, and those white men who have lived longest in the heart of Africa seem to have the largest hope that the Dark Continent may be enlightened and a confidence in an African capacity for an existence much above the savage traditions. These hopes are based in most cases on the expectation that white people will furnish the government and direct the industries. Whatever Africa may do for itself, the one notable effort to create an African state on an Anglo-Saxon model has been a failure. The Republic of Liberia was founded nearly a century ago, as a means of regenerating Africa by Christian civilization diffused from this spot on the coast into the interior; it was to be an outport for tropical products and to furnish Africa an example of democratic state building. Liberia is the African state in which the United States is especially interested, for it was planted by American missionaries and agents of the Colonization Society; and has been an offshoot and almost a colony of this country. From the first it has been cursed by malaria, by the inroads and pressure of savages, and by a situation off the world's highways of commerce. To be sure its 15,000 civilized people have a public revenue of about $300,000, with a total import and export trade of about $1,000,000; but all efforts to induce a considerable number of Negroes from America to try their fortunes in Liberia have been failures. A colored magazine in Boston has had the humor and good-temper lately to reprint the following squib upon the opportunities in that country for the American Negro: Liberia's bridges, mills, and dams, Need many thousand Afro-Ams. Liberia's ewes, Liberia's lambs, Like black sheep, baa for Afro-Ams.