In Darkest England and The Way Out | Page 7

nearly approaching the
baboon than was supposed to be possible, but very human; the other
very handsome, with frank open innocent features, very prepossessing.
They are quick and intelligent, capable of deep affection and gratitude,
showing remarkable industry and patience. A pygmy boy of eighteen
worked with consuming zeal; time with him was too precious to waste
in talk. His mind seemed ever concentrated on work. Mr. Stanley said:
--
"When I once stopped him to ask him his name, his face seemed to say,
'Please don't stop me. I must finish my task.'
"All alike, the baboon variety and the handsome innocents, are
cannibals. They are possessed with a perfect mania for meat. We were
obliged to bury our dead in the river, lest the bodies should be exhumed
and eaten, even when they had died from smallpox."
Upon the pygmies and all the dwellers of the forest has descended a
devastating visitation in the shape of the ivory raiders of civilisation.
The race that wrote the Arabian Nights, built Bagdad and Granada, and

invented Algebra, sends forth men with the hunger for gold in their
hearts, and Enfield muskets in their hands, to plunder and to slay. They
exploit the domestic affections of the forest dwellers in order to strip
them of all they possess in the world. That has been going on for years.
It is going on to-day. It has come to be regarded as the natural and
normal law of existence. Of the religion of these hunted pygmies Mr.
Stanley tells us nothing, perhaps because there is nothing to tell. But an
earlier traveller, Dr. Kraff, says that one of these tribes, by name Doko,
had some notion of a Supreme Being, to whom, under the name of Yer,
they sometimes addressed prayers in moments of sadness or terror. In
these prayers they say; "Oh Yer, if Thou dost really exist why dost
Thou let us be slaves? We ask not for food or clothing, for we live on
snakes, ants, and mice. Thou hast made us, wherefore dost Thou let us
be trodden down?"
It is a terrible picture, and one that has engraved itself deep on the heart
of civilisation. But while brooding over the awful presentation of life as
it exists in the vast African forest, it seemed to me only too vivid a
picture of many parts of our own land. As there is a darkest Africa is
there not also a darkest England? Civilisation, which can breed its own
barbarians, does it not also breed its own pygmies? May we not find a
parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone's throw of our
cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found
existing in the great Equatorial forest?
The more the mind dwells upon the subject, the closer the analogy
appears. The ivory raiders who brutally traffic in the unfortunate
denizens of the forest glades, what are they but the publicans who
flourish on the weakness of our poor? The two tribes of savages the
human baboon and the handsome dwarf, who will not speak lest it
impede him in his task, may be accepted as the two varieties who are
continually present with us--the vicious, lazy lout, and the toiling slave.
They, too, have lost all faith of life being other than it is and has been.
As in Africa, it is all trees trees, trees with no other world conceivable;
so is it here--it is all vice and poverty and crime. To many the world is
all slum, with the Workhouse as an intermediate purgatory before the
grave. And just as Mr. Stanley's Zanzibaris lost faith, and could only be
induced to plod on in brooding sullenness of dull despair, so the most
of our social reformers, no matter how cheerily they may have started

off, with forty pioneers swinging blithely their axes as they force their
way in to the wood, soon become depressed and despairing. Who can
battle against the ten thousand million trees? Who can hope to make
headway against the innumerable adverse conditions which doom the
dweller in Darkest England to eternal and immutable misery? What
wonder is it that many of the warmest hearts and enthusiastic workers
feel disposed to repeat the lament of the old English chronicler, who,
speaking of the evil days which fell upon our forefathers in the reign of
Stephen, said "It seemed to them as if God and his Saints were dead."
An analogy is as good as a suggestion; it becomes wearisome when it is
pressed too far. But before leaving it, think for a moment how close the
parallel is, and how strange it is that so much interest should be excited
by a narrative of human squalor and human heroism in a