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