No One Can Understand The Effect
Of The Unutterable Meanness Of The Slave-System On The Minds Of Those Who,
But For The Strange Obliquity Which Prevents Them From Feeling
The Degradation Of Not Being Gentlemen Enough To Pay For Services Rendered,
Would Be Equal In Virtue To Ourselves.
Fraud becomes as natural to them
as "paying one's way" is to the rest of mankind.
Wherever a missionary lives, traders are sure to come;
they are mutually dependent, and each aids in the work of the other;
but experience shows that the two employments can not very well be combined
in the same person. Such a combination would not be morally wrong,
for nothing would be more fair, and apostolical too, than that the man
who devotes his time to the spiritual welfare of a people
should derive temporal advantage from upright commerce,
which traders, who aim exclusively at their own enrichment,
modestly imagine ought to be left to them. But, though it is right
for missionaries to trade, the present system of missions
renders it inexpedient to spend time in so doing. No missionary
with whom I ever came in contact, traded; and while the traders,
whom we introduced and rendered secure in the country, waxed rich,
the missionaries have invariably remained poor, and have died so.
The Jesuits, in Africa at least, were wiser in their generation than we;
theirs were large, influential communities, proceeding on the system
of turning the abilities of every brother into that channel
in which he was most likely to excel; one, fond of natural history,
was allowed to follow his bent; another, fond of literature,
found leisure to pursue his studies; and he who was great in barter
was sent in search of ivory and gold-dust; so that while in the course
of performing the religious acts of his mission to distant tribes,
he found the means of aiding effectually the brethren
whom he had left in the central settlement.* We Protestants,
with the comfortable conviction of superiority, have sent out missionaries
with a bare subsistence only, and are unsparing in our laudations of some
for not being worldly-minded whom our niggardliness made to live
as did the prodigal son.
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