WESTERN LIBERIA	93
tical or commercial contacts. The black Govern-
ment distrusts them and no European firm has any
trading posts in the Liberian hinterland. Faith in
their religion is the only thing which can have in-
duced American monks and English nuns to settle
at Bolahun. There is no drama to compensate them
for the fever, the worms and the rats; the only danger
is the danger of snake-bite or disease. They are not
ascetics, who find satisfaction in cords and hair-shirts;
they have done their best, once settled in Bolahun, to
make themselves comfortable. The fathers have built
a little hospital, they get their chop boxes from Fort-
num and Mason, wine comes in over the French
border, vegetables once a month from Sierra Leone;
they have even built a kind of rough hard court for
tennis. They haven't forced Christianity on an un-
willing people, they haven't made a happy naked race
wear clothes, they haven't stopped the native dances.
The native in West Africa will always wear clothes if
he has the money to buy them, he will always prefer
a robe to a loin-cloth, and to anyone who has spent
much time in the bush villages the roughest native
robe will appear aesthetically preferable to the human
body—the wrinkled dugs, the running sores. As for
the dances and the fetish worship, the missionaries
have not the power to stop them if they wished to;
Christianity here has its back to the wall. Converts
are comparatively few; there is no material advan-
tage in being converted; the only advantage is a
spiritual one, of being released from a few fears, of
being offered an insubstantial hope.
And in Bolahun particularly there were material
disadvantages in  Christianity.   No white man is