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 orphan girl in our Christian capital?We talk about the brutalities of the dark ages,and we profess to shudder as we read in books of the shameful exaction of the rights of feudal superior.And yet here,beneath our very eyes,in our theatres,in our restaurants,and in many other places,unspeakable though it be but to name it,the same hideous abuse flourishes unchecked.A young penniless girl,if she be pretty,is often hunted from pillar to post by her employers,confronted always by the alternative--Starve or Sin.And when once the poor girl has consented to buy the right to earn her living by the sacrifice of her virtue,then she is treated as a slave and an outcast by the very men who have ruined her.Her word becomes unbelievable,her life an ignominy,and she is swept downward ever downward,into the bottomless perdition of prostitution.But there,even in the lowest depths,excommunicated by Humanity and outcast from God,she is far nearer the pitying heart of the One true Saviour than all the men who forced her down,aye,and than all the Pharisees and Scribes who stand silently by while these Fiendish wrongs are perpetrated before their very eyes.