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?