368 THE LAND OF THE LION 
can at present take. He has offered him membership 
in a great, free (no Mohammedan can be a slave) brother- 
hood. And the East African crowds to him, and proudly 
steps forward into the better, higher life offered. 
Africa is the land of failures. We have as yet no knowl- 
edge which enables us to do more than guess at the cause 
of such universal failure. But the sad fact remains. 
Religious and political influences that have succeeded else- 
where have failed in Africa. If we except the Egyptians, 
no African race has risen to greatness, no African people 
have written their name distinctly on any record of olden 
or modern time. Africa proper has never had a chance. 
In oldest times as in most modern, its fate has been to be 
ravaged by the gold-seeker and the slave-hunter. No 
nation seems to have cared or thought it worth while so 
much as to try to bring to its dark millions the blessings 
of order and settled rule. Religious movements that 
transformed the rest of the world and gave or preserved to 
mankind art, literature, civilization and hope, in dark 
tempestuous times, if they ever seriously tried to help 
Africa, failed. They seem indeed, never to have deeply pene- 
trated the continent, and soon lost foothold even on the 
coast. 
We know that in the fifth century there were no less 
than four-hundred African bishoprics. For a time the 
African branch of the Christian Church was strong both in 
members and influence; but even in those days of her 
glory she seems to have stood helplessly before the stupen- 
dous missionary problem which the dark, unknown southern 
continent presented to her, and was contented to main- 
tain herself among the civilized and luxurious peoples of 
the coast lands, while she left unhelped and untaught 
the dark millions beyond the mountains. Perhaps if she 
had better discharged her duty to them, they might have 
in turn succoured her, in her long and bloody decline. 
