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TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



consistent. It is not so with Christianity, as 

 practised by white men and taught by example 

 and precept to the negro. The most prominent 

 of its aggressions against his every-day customs 

 are those against polygamy and slavery. The 

 negro, on referring to the sacred book of the Eu- 

 ropean, to which appeal is made for the truth of 

 all doctrine, finds no edict against either the one 

 or the other, but he reads that the wisest of men 

 had a larger harem than any modern African 

 potentate, and that slave-holding was the estab- 

 lished custom in the ancient world. The next 

 most prominent of its doctrines are social equal- 

 ity, submission to injury, disregard of wealth, and 

 the propriety of taking no thought for the mor- 

 row. He, however, finds the practice of the white 

 race from whom his instructions come, to be ex- 

 ceedingly different from this. He discovers very 

 soon that they absolutely refuse to consider him 

 as their equal ; that they are by no means tame 

 under insult, but very much the reverse of it ; 

 that the chief aim of their lives is to acquire 

 wealth ; and that one of the most despised char- 

 acteristics among them is that of heedlessness 

 and want of thrift. Far be it from us to say that 

 the modern practice in these matters may not be 

 justified, but it appears to require more subtlety 

 of reasoning than the negro can comprehend, or 

 perhaps even than the missionary can command, 

 to show their conformity with Bible-teaching. 



The influence of the English in Africa is bare- 

 ly felt beyond the boundaries of their colonies. 

 We have held Sierra Leone, and many points of 

 vantage on the West African coast, for two gen- 

 erations. The philanthropists and the merchants 

 have both been busily engaged there in immediate 

 relations with the negro, but the result is that, 

 at the back of our settlements, paganism begins 

 and our influence ceases. We cannot even keep 

 open the roads of communication with the neigh- 

 boring interior. They are closed by force, by 

 passive obstruction, or by prohibitive dues. The 

 weight of barbarism is far too great for the efforts 

 of our few travelers to remove. We might go 

 into lengthy details in evidence of this ; two or 

 three will suffice. First as regards land-travel: 

 it is now only eight years ago that an English- 

 man, Mr. Winwood Reade, succeeded in penetrat- 

 ing 250 miles inland from Sierra Leone, and 

 reaching the sources of the Niger. Another fact 

 is the savagery among the people about the 

 mouths of that same river, notwithstanding the 

 persistent and costly efforts that have been made 

 to turn its stream into a frequented and commer- 

 cial water-way. For a third fact in evidence of 



the flourishing barbarism in the neighborhood of 

 our settlements, we may point to the existence of 

 such a kingdom as Ashanti. 



The failure of our influence in opening safe 

 lines of commerce to the interior is due to three 

 causes : In the first place, we do not travel in 

 sufficient numbers or with sufficient frequency to 

 maintain communications ; we shall probably 

 never do so, because the commercial gains prom- 

 ise to be very slight, the country is unhealthy, 

 and the number of men who care to risk the fa- 

 tigues and expense of such journeys is small. In 

 the second place, our free trade in rum and mus- 

 kets demoralizes the people. In the third place, 

 a large part of the bulky produce shipped for us 

 by negroes from the coast is reared and gathered 

 in the immediate neighborhood by slave-labor, 

 belonging to the chief who sells it ; it is therefore 

 an advantage to him to possess many slaves, so 

 he acquires through our free trade the necessary 

 guns and ammunition to make raids upon his 

 neighbors to catch as many slaves as he requires. 

 The consequence is, that adjacent to his frontiers 

 are lands whose inhabitants are in enmity with 

 him, and through traffic becomes impossible. 



The Arabs, on the other hand, prohibit all 

 forms of alcohol ; they are easily acclimatized, and 

 they settle and travel in multitudes; they have 

 been great openers of routes, being urged not 

 only by the commercial stimulus, but also by the 

 religious one of making the pilgrimage to Mecca. 

 Routes have been established by them across the 

 broadest parts of the Continent of Africa. In the 

 south, the Arabs had penetrated to Nyangwe, 

 from either coast, earlier than our explorers. We 

 have already shown that in the heart of Africa, 

 in that part of the Congo most removed from 

 Nyangwe in the east, and the Ycllala Falls on 

 the west, which had been the previous outposts 

 of exploration by the white man, Mr. Stanley ap- 

 pears to have passed by that very river-bank on 

 which Barth's literary friend stood some thirty 

 years ago, with, so to speak, his Arabic trans- 

 lations from Plato in the one pocket and those 

 from Aristotle in the other. 



The Arab traders from Zanzibar are unques- 

 tionably the apostles of a lower civilization than 

 their fellows in Northern Africa, being apparently 

 more demoralized by the larger proportions of 

 the horrible slave-trade prevailing there. Never- 

 theless, there are many men among them capable 

 of better things, and their race is probably des- 

 tined to play an increasingly important part in 

 the whole of Equatorial Africa. The ideal of the 

 Arab is far lower than that of the white man, but, 



