Egba god of fire; and, if not criminals and convicts in their own country,
at best paupers clad in dishclouts and palm-oil. The excuse is that a
white jury cannot be collected among the forty or fifty eligibles in
Freetown. It is vain to 'challenge,' for other negroes will surely take
the place of those objected to. No one raises the constitutional question,
'Are these half-reclaimed savages my peers?' And if he did, Justice would
sternly reply, 'Yes.' The witnesses will forswear themselves, not, like
our 'posters,' for half a crown, but gratis, because the plaintiff or
defendant is a fellow-tribesman. The judge may be 'touched with a
tar-brush;' but, be he white as milk, he must pass judgment according to
verdict. This state of things recalls to mind the Ireland of the early
nineteenth century, when the judges were prefects armed with a penal code,
and the jurymen vulgar, capricious, and factious partisans.

Surely such a caricature of justice, such an outrage upon reason, was
never contemplated by British law or lawgiver. Our forefathers never
dreamt that the free institutions for which they fought and bled during
long centuries would thus be prostituted, would be lavished upon every
black 'recaptive,' be he thief, wizard, or assassin, after living some
fourteen days in a black corner of the British empire. Even the Irishman
and the German must pass some five years preparing themselves in the
United States before they become citizens. Sensible Africans themselves
own that 'the negro race is not fitted, without a guiding hand, to
exercise the privileges of English citizenship.' A writer of the last
century justly says, 'Ideas of perfect liberty have too soon been given to
this people, considering their utter ignorance. If one of them were asked
why he does not repair his house, clear his farm, mend his fence, or put
on better clothes, he replies that "King no give him work dis time," and
that he can do no more than "burn bush and plant little _cassader_ for
yam."'