Page:The future of Africa.djvu/114

105 Where peoples and nations have been so situated that they could be touched by influence and power, there men have gone upward and onward. And this accounts for the fact that newly-discovered islands in the seas have almost always been found low, degraded, and bestial; while, on the other hand, the peoples and races living on continents, generally exhibit the evidences of progress and improvement. But so far as contact with the elements of civilization is concerned, so far as the possibility of being touched by the mental and moral influences of superior and elevating forces is implied, Africa might as well have been an island as a continent. The Desert of Sahara has served as effectually to cut off Africa from the ancient civilizations, as the ocean, for long centuries, separated the Sandwich Islands from the Avorld's enlightenment. Here is the solvement of Africa's benightedness. Physical causes have divorced her from the world's cultivation and improvement. A great ocean of sand has shut her off from that law of both national and individual growth, namely, that culture and enlightenment have got to be brought to all new peoples, and made indigenous among them. Thrown thus back upon herself, unvisited by cither the mission of letters, or of grace, poor Africa, all the ages through, has been generating, and then reproducing, the whole brood and progeny of superstitions, idolatries, and paganisms, through all her quarters. And hence the most pitiful, the most abject of all human conditions! And hence the most sorrowful of all histories! The most miserable, even now, of all spectacles!