Chapter I.
Why "Darkest England"?
This summer the attention of the civilized
world has been arrested by the story which
Mr. Stanley has told of "Darkest Africa" and
his journeyings across the heart of the Lost
Continent. In all that spirited narrative
of heroic endeavor, nothing has so much impressed
the imagination, as his description of the
immense forest, which offered an almost impenetrable
barrier to his advance. The intrepid explorer,
in his own phrase, "marched, tore, ploughed,
and cut his way for one hundred and sixty
days through this inner womb of the true
tropical forest." The mind of man with
difficulty endeavors to realize this immensity
of wooded wilderness, covering a territory
half as large again as the whole of France,
where the rays of the sun never penetrate,
where in the dark, dank air, filled with
the steam of the heated morass, human beings
dwarfed into pygmies and brutalized into
cannibals lurk and live and die. Mr. Stanley
vainly endeavors to ring home to us the full
horror of that awful gloom. * * *
It is a terrible picture, and one that has
engraved itself deep on the heart of civilization.
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? Civilization, 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 into 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? * * *
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 civilization 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,
corpse-like, with the artificialities and
hypocrisies of modern civilization. * * *