Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/178

156 Practicability of Transporting the Negro back to Africa,' those views, when read, were characterized by a number of men of science in Washington, biolo- gists and anthropologists included, as ' chimerical,' or ' absurd,' and the mildest epithet that was applied to them being that they were ' highly impracticable.' To those reviewers I would now say a word, and kindly invite their attention to the November bulletin of the American Colonization Society for the present year, which announces a very radical change in the plans heretofore adopted by that Society. ' When the Society was first organized, domestic slavery in this country existed in its full vigor, but the foreign slave trade had been abolished by law. The leading pur- pose of the Society was to improve the condition of the comparatively few negroes who were then free or might thereafter be set free by their masters, and to provide for those recaptured from slave-vessels still pursuing their nefarious and at that time unlawful traffic. Various projects were deliberately considered, and it was finally decided to return them to their na- tive land and found a colony on the west coast of Africa. Hence came Liberia, with its eventful culmi- nation in an independent republic, as we find it today, and its seventy-five years of most interesting history.' " The Society has at last come to believe that ' no legislation can abolish race prejudice and social dis- crimination, and it is believed that the negro can have a freedom for development in Liberia which no laws, however just or favorable, will secure him in this country.' " And, after propounding numerous questions to the readers of its Bulletin, it further asks : * Shall Liberia