6 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

his goods, but in this country the buyer enforces
the price to suit his convenience. . . .

The Government can kill all the people of Sass-
town and all the tribes of the Kru Coast before we
surrender to the Government. We will not return
to the coast or surrender until we hear from the
British Consul in Monrovia that there will be no
more war. Then we will return to Old Sass-
town. . . .

There was something satisfyingly complete about
this picture. It really seemed as though you couldn't
go deeper than that; the agony was piled on in the
British Government Blue Book with a real effect of
grandeur; the little injustices of Kenya became
shoddy and suburban beside it.

And it was saved from melodrama by its irony, by
the fact that the Republic was founded as an example
to all Africa of a Christian and self-governing state.
An American philanthropic society at the beginning
of the nineteenth century (many of its directors,
it is said, were slave-owners who found it con-
venient thus to get rid of their illegitimate children)
began to ship released slaves to the Grain Coast of
Africa. Land was bought from the native rulers and
a settlement established at Monrovia. "The love of
liberty brought us here," but one can hardly blame
these first half-caste settlers when they found that
love of their own liberty was not consistent with the
liberty of the native tribes. The history of the
RepubEc was very little different from the history of
neighbouring white colonies: it included the same
broken contracts, the same resort to arms, the same