Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 3.djvu/271

 jocular English nicknames, such as Jack-after-Supper, Flying Jib, Two-pound-ten, and the like. Most of the villages also have an English by-name, and nearly every group of huts has in its vicinity a quarter bearing a similar name, preceded by the words "half," or "picanniny." The Kroos are also taking to European clothes, pea-jackets, felt or straw-hats, umbrellas, bracelets, and other ornaments, and the houses themselves are often fitted up with English furniture.

It may be questioned whether this native race is not exercising more civilising influences on the indigenous elements than the "American" colonists with their

pedantic ways and borrowed formulas. The white population numbered in 1884 no more than forty persons, all males except the wife of a missionary. The coloured people call themselves whites, and as such aspire to the government of the republic. Here party struggles turn on the ascendancy of the "coloured" or half-caste and full-blood Negroes, and hitherto the former have maintained themselves in office.

Apart from a few upright men who have endeavoured to carry out the work of moral regeneration for which the colony was founded, most of the Weegee, or "civilised" Liberians, endeavour to assert their own superiority by despising the