Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/740

730 For this happy state of things, contrasting so advantageously with the records of too many other neighbouring colonies, the wise and kindly rule of an enlightened government has been, of course, the principal promoter and cause. But no small share of the praise is also due to the truest friends and best guides Europe has ever supplied to the African race, the Moravian brothers. More fortunate than their compeers of Jamaica and its sister islands, the Surinam slaves fell to the share of these Moravian teachers, who had already as far back as 1735 organized settlements among the Indians of the interior with much labour and little result. It is remarkable that almost the only teachers who have met with any success — and indeed their success, so to call it, has been considerable, among the Indians of the two continents south and north — are Roman Catholic priests. A sensuous idolatry best fits a sensuous good-for-nothing race. Whereas when a Catholic missionary suggested to a bush negro the other day the propriety of exchanging his hereditary worship of the cotton-tree for that of an imaged Virgin Mary, the black is reported to have answered, "God made our idol, man made yours; and, besides, ours is the finer of the two," and accordingly declined the exchange. "Se non è vero, è ben trovato."

But to return to the Moravians. When, after some difficulty, though less than might have been anticipated from the nature of things, on the masters' part, they were allowed to turn their attention to the slaves, their success was as rapid as it was well-deserved. In 1776 the first negro was baptized and admitted as a member of the congregation, and the countenance publicly and generously given on the occasion by the governor of the colony marked this step with the importance of a historical event. The very same year a Moravian teaching-establishment was opened on one of the Commeweyne estates, others followed, and long before the emancipation of 1863, three-fourths of the working negroes had been numbered in the Moravian ranks. The latest census gives nineteen Moravian schools, attended by more than two thousand two hundred children, while over twenty-four thousand names, all creole, are inscribed in the register of the Herrnhut brotherhood.

That the emancipation, too long deferred, of 1863, was neither preceded, accompanied, nor followed in Dutch Guiana by any disturbances like those which agitated Jamaica, Demerara, and other settlements thirty years before; that apprenticeship, so signal a failure elsewhere, here proved a success; that when this too came to its appointed end in 1873, scarce one among the thousand of creole labourers on the estates struck work, or took advantage of his new completeness of freedom to give himself up to idleness and vagabond life — these things are mainly due, so the colonists acknowledge, to the spirit of subordination, industry, and order inspired in their pupils by the Moravian teachers. Their loyalty and good sense had prepared a people worthy of the rights into the enjoyment of which they at last entered; they had made of the slaves under their tutorial care, not only, as the phrase goes, good Christians, but they had also made of them what the majority of other teachers had failed to do, good citizens and good subjects; loyal to their government, respectful to their superiors, orderly among themselves. Obeah and poisoning, serious crimes indeed in any form, are almost unknown in Dutch Guiana.

Liberty of conscience and the freedom of every man to choose and follow whatever religion he will, are very good things; yet even their warmest supporter would hardly hesitate to bring up his children by preference in that form of religion to which he himself belongs. Negroes in their present phase are children; when newly emancipated they might have been more properly termed babies; and there would certainly have been then no harm, nor even much difficulty, in prescribing for them some one of the many modes of Christianity best adapted to their comprehension and capabilities. And of all modes the Moravian, with its simple creed, simple though emotional worship, strict discipline, and absence of priestly caste-ship, would I venture to think have been the best.

These reflections, which, so far as they are merely reflections, the reader-companion of my trip is free to adopt or reject as he pleases, have in this my narrative derived their origin from the sight of the barn-like buildings of the Moravian establishment called of Charlottenburg alongside of which we are now borne on the clear black depths of the Cottica. The high-roofed conventual-looking mansion occupied by teachers themselves has a somewhat German air; the chapel, schoolhouse, and cattle-sheds, from which last, with garden cultivation and farming work on a small scale, the mission is chiefly