The Kernel vestment of capital as this small railway. Animals
Argument, of all kinds, and human carriers have been tested,
and have proved to be failures; the cataracts are
impassable; aerial navigation, unfortunately, cannot
compete with the railway as yet, and until that time
arrives every article that a mortal man needs must pay
toll of freight to this iron road.
To-day £52,000 are paid per annum for porterage
between Stanley Pool and the coast, by native traders,
the International Association, and three Missions,
which is equal to 5X per cent, on the £940,000 said to
be needed to construct the railway to the Pool. But let
the Yivi and Stanley Pool railroad be constructed, and
it would require an army of Grenadiers to prevent the
traders from moving on to secure the favourite places
in the commercial El Dorado of Africa.
The equatorial regions of Africa have for ages defied
Islamism, Christianity, science, and trade. Like the
waves beating on a rocky shore, so Islamism has dashed
itself repeatedly from the north in its frantic effort to
reach the line of the Equator. Christianity has also
made ineffectual attempts for the last three centuries
to obtain a footing in the same region, but ignorance of
the climate caused its retirement. Science has directed
strategic assaults upon the closely-besieged area, and
has succeeded in retiring with brilliant results; its
success, however, has been only temporary, as Trade,
which ought to have followed, stood dazed with the
difficulties which the pioneers encountered.
Thus the equatorial region/which offers such large
AFRICA RECLAIMABLE. 373
prospects to the enterprising, has been left to stew in The Kernel
-of the its own juice of fatness. Civilisation, so often baffled, Argument,
stands railing at the barbarism and savagery that
presents such an impenetrable front to its efforts. It
feigns to forget by what process England, Gaul, and
Belgae were redeemed. from barbarism; and because
at this late hour there still emerges into light the great
heart of Africa with its countless millions without the
slightest veneer of artificialism over man’s natural state,
it thoughtlessly exclaims that the African savages are
irreclaimable,. How is it possible that these natives of
Africa, whose bonds have been fixed in such .’an inaccessible
area, could have been otherwise ? < No people
that we have any record of have ever risen out of the
slough of barbarism without external help. Europe has
been compounded.out of the relics of many nations and
tribes—Celts, Huns, Goths, Yandals, Greeks, Romans,
Franks, Saxons, Normans, Saracens, Turks, who have
become involved with one another a thousand times in
commotions and contentions during many centuries.
It is out of the fragments of warring myriads that the
present polished nations of Europe have sprung. Had
a few of those waves of races flowing and eddying over
Northern Africa succeeded in leaping the barrier of the
Equator, we should have found the black aboriginal
races of Southern Africa very different from the savages
we meet to-day.
But until the latter half of the nineteenth century,
the world was ignorant of what lay beyond the rapids
of Isangila, or how slight was the obstacle which lay