ask, can be that innate and universal monitor in the case of a
people, the Somal for instance, who rob like Spartans, holding
theft a virtue; who lie like Trojans, without a vestige of
appreciation for truth; and who hold the treacherous and cowardly
murder of a sleeping guest to be the height of human honour? And
what easier than to prove that there is no sin however infamous,
no crime however abominable, which at some time or in some part
of the world has been or is still held in the highest esteem? The
utmost we can say is that conscience, the accident, flows
directly from an essential. All races now known to the world have
a something which they call right, and a something which they
term wrong; the underlying instinctive idea being evidently that
everything which benefits me is good, and all which harms me is
evil. Their good and their evil are not those of more advanced
nations; still the idea is there, and progress or tradition works
it out in a thousand different ways.

My visits to Mr. Walker first gave me the idea of making the
negro describe his own character in a collection of purely
Hamitic proverbs and idioms. It appeared to me that, if ever a
book aspires to the title of "l'Africain peint par lui-meme," it
must be one in which he is the medium to his own spirit, the
interpreter to his own thoughts. Hence "Wit and Wisdom from West
Africa" (London, Tinsleys, 1856), which I still hold to be a step
in the right direction, although critics, who possibly knew more
of Cornhill than of Yoruba, assured me that it was "rather a
heavy compilation." Nor can I yet see how the light fantastic toe
can show its agility in the sabots of African proverbs.