We may, I think, look upon the Boer colonists who tracked across the Kalahari waste and are living to-day six hundred miles within the tropics among the highlands of southern Angola, in full enjoyment of many blessings, as the forerunners of a considerable number of white farmers and artisans, who, in time, will be established at various points of vantage. No one who has studied the influence for good which the much decried Arabs of equatorial Africa have had upon the natives in the development of industries and particularly of legitimate trade and rice cultivation can have any doubt that these coming centers of white colonization, insignificant as they will be when compared with the whole area, will be important points for the diffusion of ideas and influences that will tend to elevate the people; just as we see that influences now operating at Blantyre, in the Buddu province of Uganda, and at scores of other places are tending to-day to help the natives.

From one other direction we may expect a stream of white influence that will penetrate to the heart of the continent. When Montagu Kerr described Mashonaland in 1884, he scouted the idea of European colonization, and did not see how the white race could turn that region to good account. Nine years later we see three thousand white men, women and children on those uplands, several towns, a newspaper, telegraphic communication with the rest of the world, and a railroad pushing towards the district. We know that the mean elevation of Africa above the sea is double that of Europe; that to its elevated plateaus we may largely attribute the fact that equatorial Africa supports millions of people while the low lying, equatorial region in South America, the Amazon's basin, is very sparsely inhabited. We know that the high plateau of South Africa projects the temperate zone north of the southern tropic, and that the area of South Africa adapted for white occupancy is believed to be six or seven times that of France. Empires of the white race are developing in South Africa that will extend far towards the tropical regions and will be brought by railroads, to the very doors of the Congo Free State and German East Africa.

If Mr. Rankin reports accurately, an area of valuable coal lands, embracing about five hundred square miles, has been found north of the Zambezi. Within two years Thomson. and Rankin have visited the lofty region southwest of Lake Nyassa. I have briefly given you Thomsor's opinion of it. Rankin says that alluvial gold is found in nearly all the streams and that the district's mineral wealth, its suitability for extensive agriculture, the friendliness and industry of the inhabitants, and above all the high elevation of the land, make this region most suitable for white immigration and enterprise.

We may regard this coal belt the only important discovery of coal yet made in Africa, and this elevated mineral region as the stepping stones, the connecting links between the empires of the south and the regions of central Africa. In other words, the missionaries, the traders, the government agents, scattered over tropical Africa, are not always to feel themselves cut off from the enlightened world, mere atoms in a sea of barbarism, but they are to feel and benefit by the impulse of a widespread and powerful civilization that is taking firm. root on their southern borders. In the course of time we may expect that the leaven of South Africa will go far towards fitting the continent to play the highest role in civilization it is adapted for.

Here we see the two factors in the field-the untrained bone and sinew that is to furnish the motive power. I am not speaking merely of the development of intellectual leadership among the nations, I am speaking of the very beginning of the work of civilization, the white element that is to control and direct it. These natives, or many of them, will some day work for wages. The fallacy that the African will not work, except under compulsion, is disproved, not only by the history of millions of them in the western world, but also by the daily record of thousands in Africa, who a few years ago had never seen a white man. They are working for hire on the Congo railroad, on the plantations of the Usagara highlands, at various centres in Nyassaland in the diamond fields, at the German ports in east Africa, in the Cameroons, and elsewhere.

A church edifice that would adorn any suburb of this city, and that the explorer Thomson refers to as "the most wonderful sight I have seen in Africa" has been built near Lake Nyassa by native craftsmen who a few years ago were in a state of barbarism. They made the bricks, burned the lime, hewed and sawed the timbers and built the edifice to the driving of the last nail. The natives had the capacity, and it was evoked by the genius of one of the most remarkable men in Africa, Missionary Scott, of Blantyre.

The training of native labor is a slow and painful process requiring a degree of patience and tact not possessed by all workers in Africa; but the progress already made is a good omen for the future. The eagerness to trade and the native love of acquisition, traits as common to most Africans, as among progressive northern peoples, may be utilized to promote industry and commerce.

It costs $200 a ton to transport rubber around the Congo cataracts and rubber collecting can never reach a large development until the railroad lifts this embargo upon trade. But even under these conditions, when the natives are not specially stimulated to work, they brought to the stations in the first six months of last year 540,000 pounds of rubber, carried it on their backs 235 miles around the cataracts and it sold for nearly $200,000 in Belgium.

The plantation, the stock range, the mine and the forest will be chief among the types of African industry. The future of the Congo, for instance, depends not upon its ivory, for that will fail, but upon the rubber, essences and other products of its forests and most of all, upon the opening of plantations for the production of sugar, tobacco and perhaps cotton. The plantation is the chief material development for which the Germans in Usagara and the Cameroons and various white interests in Nyassaland and some other districts have been striving. The coffee of Usagara graded with the superior qualities in the Paris market, last year, and the planters in these highlands shipped their first sixteen bales of cotton to Europe. The future of many districts is now believed to depend upon planting enterprises and the tentative efforts in

this direction, on the whole, are encouraging both with regard to the product and the labor needed to attain it.

Several years ago, many white men in Africa advocated a system of forced labor, like that employed by The Netherlands to develop the Dutch East Indies. The Dutch system was a mild one, avoided abuses that are most akin to slavery, and the country and people thrived under it. There seems now no prospect whatever that a similar system will be introduced into Africa. The idea has to-day no strenuous advocates, and the policy of voluntary labor, secured by a gradual process of manual training, has thus far met with encouraging results.

Many an untutored African has already come to understand that white men are conferring blessings. It is a blessing that he appreciates when he feels, for the first time, that his banana patch is safe from destruction, that his family is secure from midnight attack. Good government in a barbarous community is not attainable in a month or a year. It is coming in Africa, for the nations chiefly interested are planting its seeds and know how to nurture them. It is impossible to discuss here the various systems of government introduced, the military organization of Germany, the chartered companies, with large powers, of Great Britain, or the colonial system of France. All have their advantages, all are making progress toward good government. Beneficent ideas are at the bottom of the Congo Free State's policy. Among untold thousands of these people of whom we had never heard seventeen years ago, human sacrifices, cannibalism and slave raids are now forbidden, and murder is a crime.

It is true that King Leopold's broad and philanthropic ideas have fallen far short of realization; that some of his agents, sent to Africa to be just and helpful, have been most unjust and cruel. The good intentions of the real promoters of the African movement are failing to realize the expectations of the over-sanguine. But the sius of omission and commission are blemishes such as have always marked similar enterprises in every age. It should be expected of this era, that in proportion to the magnitude of the work, such blem

ishes be less numerous and conspicuous than ever before; and I believe this to be the fact. There are many instances of abuse of power and inhumanity on the part of the whites. But after all, progress is making in nearly all directions toward good government, and by strides so rapid as almost to keep pace with the enormous development of African exploration.

When the Brussels Conference adjourned, there were few who believed that the backbone of Arab slave raiding would be broken in a hundred years. To-day, the final overthrow of the East African, Arab slaver seems to be at [hand. He has been expelled from Uganda with orders not to return. If we may credit the latest news, he has been hopelessly defeated in the Congo State; and the Germans are his master in East Africa. It will not be an unmixed blessing if he is expelled from inner Africa; for not all his enterprises are illegitimate; and in some directions he has paved the way for the development of the regions where so long he has been supreme. (Hore and Hodister and Wanters.)

All these things are merely the beginnings of preparations. to reclaim Africa. I do not know that any instrument which will facilitate the work has been left out of the equipment. Railroads are needed, not only for commerce, but for every phase of African progress; and we see nine of them now building in tropical Africa. A great deal of the work in all lines must advance at snail's pace until the better means of communication, now preparing, are available. Governments and private enterprise are pouring more money into Africa to-day than ever. This is so because the more that practical men study Africa on the ground, the more firmly convinced are they, that while the continent is not an Eldorado, nor a North America, it is well worth working for.

So, on all the lines of study and effort, progress is making. The toiler in Africa knows now in what areas it is almost hopeless for a white man to try to live more than a year or two, and retain his bodily vigor. He knows, far better than he did, how to live in Africa and keep in fair health. He knows the districts where white colonization, on a limited