To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II | Page 7

Leone contains 18,660 Episcopalians; 17,093 Wesleyans and Methodists of the New Connection; 2,717 Lady Huntingdonians; 388 Baptists, and 369 Catholics. These native Christians keep the Sundays and Church festivals with peculiar zest, and delight in discordant hymns and preaching of the most ferocious kind. The Dissenting chapel combines the Christy minstrel with Messieurs Moody and Sankey; and the well-peppered palaver-sauce of home cookery reappears in hotly spiced, bitterly pious sermons and 'experiences;' in shouts of 'Amen!' 'Glory!' and 'Hallelujah!' and in promiscuous orders to 'Hol' de fort.' Right well do I remember while the rival pilots, Messieurs Elliot and Johnson, were shamelessly perjuring themselves in the police-court, [Footnote: Wanderings in West Africa, i. pp. 256-58.] the junior generation on the other side of the building, separated by the thinnest of party-walls, was refreshing itself with psalms and spiritual songs.
We went to hear the psalmody. Ascending the staircase in the gable opposite the court-house, we passed down the hall, and saw through the open door the young idea at its mental drill in the hands of a pedagogue, apparently one of the [Greek: anaimosarka], who, ghastly white and thatched with Paganini hair, sat at the head of the room, the ruling body of the unruly rout. Down the long length, whose whitewashed walls were garnished with inscriptions, legal, moral, and religious, all sublime as far as size went, were ranged parallel rows of n��grillons in the vast costumal variety of a ragged school. They stood bolt upright, square to the fore, in the position of ' 'tention,' their naked toes disposed at an angle of 60o, with fingers close to the seams of their breeches (when not breekless), heads up and eyes front. Face and body were motionless, as if cast in ebony: nothing moved but the saucer-like white eyes and the ivory-lined mouths, from whose ample lips and gape issued a prodigious volume of sound. Native assistants, in sable skins and yellowish white chokers, carrying music-scores and armed with canes, sloped through the avenues, occasionally halting to frown down some delinquent, whose body was not perfectly motionless, and whose soul was not wholly fixed upon the development of sacred time and tune. I have no doubt that they sang--
The sun, the moon, and all the stars, &c.
precisely in the same spirit as if they had been intoning--
Peter Hill! poor soul! Flog 'um wife, oh no! oh no!
and that famous anthropological assertion--
Eve ate de appel, Gib one to daddy Adam; And so came mi-se-ry Up-on dis worl'. Chorus (bis) Oh sor-row, oh sor-row! Tri-bu-la-tion Until sal-va-tion day.
It is a pity that time and toil should be thus wasted. The negro child, like the Hindu, is much sharper, because more precocious, than the European; at six years he will become a good penman; in fact, he promises more than he can perform. Reaching the age of puberty, his capacity for progress suddenly disappears, the physical reason being well known, and the 'cute lad becomes a dummer Junge. Mrs. Melville thus describes her small servant-girl from one of these schools: 'She looks almost nine years old; and, as far as reading goes, she knows nothing more than her alphabet; can repeat the Prayer-Book Catechism by rote, and one or two hymns, utterly ignorant all the while of the import of a single word.' Even in Europe education, till lately, exercised the judgment too little, the memory too much; consequently there were more learned men than wise men. The system is now changing, and due attention is paid to the corpus sanum, the first requisite for the mens sana. The boys at S�� Leone are kept nine hours in school, learning verse by heart, practising a vocalisation which cannot be heard without pain, and toiling at the English language, which some missionaries seem to hold a second revelation. Far better two or three hours of the 'three Rs' and six of the shop or workyard. Briefly, the system should be that of the Basle Missionary Society, [Footnote: I deeply regret that Wanderings in West Africa spoke far less fairly of this establishment than it deserves. My better judgment had been warped by the prejudiced accounts of a fellow-traveller.] which combines abstract teaching with practical instruction in useful handicraft, and which thus suggests the belief that work is dignified as it is profitable.
The S�� Leonites from their earliest days were greedy to gain knowledge as the modern Greeks and Bulgarians; but the motive was not exalted. Their proverb said, 'Read book, and learn to be rogue as well as white man.' Hence useless, fanciful subjects were in vogue;--algebra, as it were, before arithmetic;--and the poor made every sacrifice to give their sons a smattering of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The desire of entering the 'professions' naturally affected the standard of education. What is still wanted