ductile and plastic, ready to receive impressions and to be shapen
by them. It does not posses the hard, aggressive features of
the character of the tribes of Northern Europe; it does not seek
by conquest to extend its power, or to mould other people to its
form. It is adapted to receive rather than to give. It is therefore
essentially imitative. From this comes the rapidity with which
under favorable influences, the African advances in civilization.
Wherever these influences are numerous and powerful enough to be the
most prominent, the negro yields to them with marvellous rapidity.

There is, perhaps, no race that gives up so readily and fully old
habits and associations. We find no granite formations of character
underlying the race, such as are met with in the tribes and peoples
of Asia. Compare, for instance, the plastic mobility of the Pangwee
and Bakwain with the rigidity of the Hindu or Chinese. Or where the
case may be seen in even a more striking way, compare the African
negro with the American Indian; take the one from his tropical
wilds, the other from his forest home, and place them both under
the same civilizing influences, and where at the end of a fixed
period will you find them? In a single generation the one is nearly
at your side, the other is simply a savage still.

The rapid rise of the negro race in the West India Islands, Jamaica,
for example, when made free by the British Government, is a very
striking illustration, though the time has been too short to bring
it out to the full. Taking all the facts as they are given us,
we find the people rising almost at once, (for thirty years are
usually as nothing in the life of a people,) out of the barbarism
of slavery, into a nation self-supporting, self-governing to
a considerable extent, moral and religious, not, indeed, in the