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