Page:Africa's redemption.djvu/32

30 grave. Charles Fenton Mercer, like Clay, a Virginian by birth, and a Kentuckian by adoption, still lives in a green and vigorous old age, and deserves immortal honour as being among the first (possibly the very first) to suggest, propagate, and devote himself to this scheme of wisdom and benevolence; but soon the projectors of this mighty enterprise will all be numbered with the dead.

Thus pass away the mighty and the excellent, but their names and labours remain, and under God's providence every good cause moves on to its destiny Few as are the remaining spirits who conceived and first embodied the idea of African colonization, the cause itself continues, not only in all its pristine freshness, but gathering strength with each revolving year, realizing already many of its splendid designs, shining like the dawn of a glorious day on the edge of a vast and benighted continent, bidding fair to indemnify that wretched race of more than one hundred and fifty millions of people, for all the wrongs and untold miseries which it has suffered at the hands of its more enlightened brethren. A stupid and malevolent prejudice may sneer as it may at the apparent insignificance of the results thus far attained, but there stands Liberia, a free, sovereign, self-sustaining Republic, acknowledged as such by the first powers of Europe (although not by our Government, as it ought to be); there she stands full of hope, full of courage, and full of promise. Already has she looked serenely on the rise and fall of the