Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VIII. The People To Be Protected. I wish I could truthfully say that the inhabitants of the great Congo basin are a fine race of people; but I cannot. It would be much more pleasant if the savages, in whom we are called upon to interest ourselves, could be described as being intelligent, amiable and teachable, like the Polynesians generally; or of high moral and social character, like the Dyaks; or hospitable to the last degree, like the Eskimo; or even as brave and enterprising in war as the Kaffirs of the South. It is much more satisfactory to work for a really noble savage with some redeeming qualities than for one who has many of the bad qualities a man should not have, and comparatively few of the redeeming features. But the truth is the truth, and it must be told. The Congo natives are about as bad savages as nature has any business to produce. To be sure, they are not so low and brutelike as the Bushmen or the native Australians, nor so ignorant as the Veddahs, nor so murderously cruel as the Dahomans, or even some of our noble redskins, for that matter. Their depravity and igno- ranee is not so bad as to be without a parallel, but, like Mercutio’s wound, it is enough. If any Christian Hercules seeks an Augean stable to cleanse, one of the very rankest kind, behold it in Africa. To those who believe in the ultimate conversion of the world, who believe in the millennium,?a hundred million dusky hands beckon from the swampy jungles and burning plains of the Dark Continent, saying more plainly than words, Come over into Macedonia and help us. Before going farther, let me place before the reader Mr. Stanley’s figures representing
the state of our actual knowledge of the population of the Congo basin: SECTION.Area inPopulation per Sq. Mi.V umber of Popul…