  Crummell is acutely aware that the linguistic resources of a moral agent help determine how fully they can reason morally and thus be capable of the agency that draws on the principles he describes. Though he is grossly unfair to the West African language Grebo, his argument that it is logically inadequate to serve the rational needs of blacks in Liberia who speak it offers an instructive account of the interplay between language and thought. There is little he likes about Grebo: it is “harsh, abrupt, energetic, and indistinct in enunciation,” he says, “meagre in point of words” and “abound[ing] with inarticulate nasal and guttural sounds” (“The English Language in Liberia” [FA], 19). It “possess[es] few inflections and grammatical forms” and hence is “exceedingly difficult of acquisition.” He feels he cannot urge Liberians to continue to speak Grebo instead of English, given his conclusions that it is plagued by “lowness of ideas, with brutal and vindictive sentiments” and with “principles” that show a predominance of “animal propensities.” This is a disaster, he writes, since (on this description) it can support few moral concepts or distinctions, let alone concepts germane to justice and politics, or even “truths of a personal, present deity” and “God's moral government.” His theoretical worries concern what the “principles” of a natural-language variety are that account for its various logical capacities, such as expressibility and generativity.