第4章 WHY "DARKEST ENGLAND"?(2)

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 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.