In Darkest England and The Way Out | Page 8

distant
continent, while greater squalor and heroism not less magnificent may
be observed at our very doors.
The Equatorial Forest traversed by Stanley resembles that Darkest
England of which I have to speak, alike in its vast extent--both stretch,
in Stanley's phrase, "as far as from Plymouth to Peterhead;" its
monotonous darkness, its malaria and its gloom, its dwarfish
de-humanized inhabitants, the slavery to which they are subjected, their
privations and their misery. That which sickens the stoutest heart, and
causes many of our bravest and best to fold their hands in despair, is
the apparent impossibility of doing more than merely to peck at the
outside of the endless tangle of monotonous undergrowth; to let light
into it, to make a road clear through it, that shall not be immediately
choked up by the ooze of the morass and the luxuriant parasitical
growth of the forest--who dare hope for that? At present, alas, it would
seem as though no one dares even to hope! It is the great Slough of
Despond of our time.
And what a slough it is no man can gauge who has not waded therein,
as some of us have done, up to the very neck for long years. Talk about
Dante's Hell, and all the horrors and cruelties of the torture-chamber of
the lost! The man who walks with open eyes and with bleeding heart
through the shambles of our civilisation needs no such fantastic images
of the poet to teach him horror. Often and often, when I have seen the
young and the poor and the helpless go down before my eyes into the
morass, trampled underfoot by beasts of prey in human shape that

haunt these regions, it seemed as if God were no longer in His world,
but that in His stead reigned a fiend, merciless as Hell, ruthless as the
grave. Hard it is, no doubt, to read in Stanley's pages of the
slave-traders coldly arranging for the surprise of a village, the capture
of the inhabitants, the massacre of those who resist, and the violation of
all the women; but the stony streets of London, if they could but speak,
would tell of tragedies as awful, of ruin as complete, of ravishments as
horrible, as if we were in Central Africa; only the ghastly devastation is
covered, corpselike, with the artificialities and hypocrisies of modern
civilisation.
The lot of a negress in the Equatorial Forest is not, perhaps, a very
happy one, but is it so very much worse than that of many a pretty
orphan girl in our Christian capital? We talk about the brutalities of the
dark ages, and we profess to shudder as we read in books of the
shameful exaction of the rights of feudal superior. And yet here,
beneath our very eyes, in our theatres, in our restaurants, and in many
other places, unspeakable though it be but to name it, the same hideous
abuse flourishes unchecked. A young penniless girl, if she be pretty, is
often hunted from pillar to post by her employers, confronted always
by the alternative--Starve or Sin. And when once the poor girl has
consented to buy the right to earn her living by the sacrifice of her
virtue, then she is treated as a slave and an outcast by the very men who
have ruined her. Her word becomes unbelievable, her life an ignominy,
and she is swept downward ever downward, into the bottomless
perdition of prostitution. But there, even in the lowest depths,
excommunicated by Humanity and outcast from God, she is far nearer
the pitying heart of the One true Saviour than all the men who forced
her down, aye, and than all the Pharisees and Scribes who stand silently
by while these Fiendish wrongs are perpetrated before their very eyes.
The blood boils with impotent rage at the sight of these enormities,
callously inflicted, and silently borne by these miserable victims. Nor is
it only women who are the victims, although their fate is the most
tragic. Those firms which reduce sweating to a fine art, who
systematically and deliberately defraud the workman of his pay, who
grind the faces of the poor, and who rob the widow and the orphan, and
who for a pretence make great professions of public spirit and
philanthropy, these men nowadays are sent to Parliament to make laws

for the people. The old prophets sent them to Hell--but we have
changed all that. They send their victims to Hell, and are rewarded by
all that wealth can do to make their lives comfortable. Read the House
of Lords' Report on the Sweating System, and ask if any African slave
system, making due allowance for the superior civilisation, and
therefore sensitiveness, of the victims, reveals more misery.
Darkest England, like Darkest Africa,