buried beneath their huts, and all their barter goods are gone.  Then one day suddenly the inevitable quarrel is picked.  And then follows a wholesale massacre.  Enough only are spared from the slaughter to carry the ivory to the coast; the grass huts of the village are set on fire; the Arabs strike camp; and the slave march, worse than death, begins.  The last act in the drama, the slave march, is the aspect of slavery which in the past has chiefly aroused the passions and the sympathy of the outside world, but the greater evil is the demoralization and disintegration of communities by which it is necessarily preceded.  It is essential to the traffic that the region drained by the slaver should be kept in perpetual political ferment; that, in order to prevent combination, chief should be pitted against chief, and that the moment any tribe threatens to assume a dominating strength it should either be broken up by the instigation of rebellion among its dependencies or made a tool of at their expense.  The inter-relation of tribes is so intricate that it is impossible to exaggerate the effect of disturbing the equilibrium at even a single centre.  But, like a river, a slave caravan has to be fed by innumerable tributaries all along its course, at first in order to gather a sufficient volume of human bodies for the start, and afterward to replace the frightful loss by desertion, disablement, and death.”

Next to Livingstone, whose last pathetic appeal to the civilized world to “heal the open sore of Africa” stands engraved in marble in Westminster Abbey, no better witness can be summoned in regard to the slave trade and the influence of Islam generally in Eastern and Central Africa than Henry M. Stanley.  From the time when he encountered the Mohammedan propagandists at the Court of Uganda he has seen how intimately and vitally the faith and the traffic are everywhere united.  I give but a single passage from his “Congo Free State,” page 144.

“We discovered that this horde of banditti—­for in reality and without disguise they were nothing else—­was under the leadership of several chiefs, but principally under Karema and Kibunga.  They had started sixteen months previously from Wane-Kirundu, about thirty miles below Vinya Njara.  For eleven months the band had been raiding successfully between the Congo and the Lubiranzi, on the left bank.  They had then undertaken to perform the same cruel work between the Biyerre and Wane-Kirundu.  On looking at my map I find that such a territory within the area described would cover superficially 16,200 square geographical miles on the left bank, and 10,500 miles on the right, all of which in statute mileage would be equal to 34,700 square miles, just 2,000 square miles greater than the island of Ireland, inhabited by about 1,000,000 people.