W. E. Burghardt Dubois, himself of African descent, declares that in Africa may be found not only the roots of the present war, but the menace of future wars. Of the process by which the European nations have gained possession of practically all the black man’s continent he speaks with passionate indignation. “Lying treaties, rivers of rum, murder, assassination, mutilation, rape and torture” have marked the progress of these nations in their campaign for African land. There is the spoil “exceeding the gold-haunted dreams of the most modern of imperialists” there is the prize for which nations will struggle indefinitely unless a new spirit is bred among them.
[Sidenote: A Continent Betrayed.] The great missionary command, “Go ye into all the world and preach my Gospel to every creature” is a sufficient direction for the Christian world in its relations with Africa; but re-inforcing it there is, or there should be, our enormous obligation to this most benighted country. Africa is the most helpless continent, the most degraded, and, alas, that it should be so, the most fearfully abused. Livingstone described it as the open sore of the world. Small countries have been exploited, the Papuans of Australia have been almost exterminated, the American Indian has been driven from hunting ground to hunting ground until all that he can call his own is a small donation of the vast land which was once his. But Africa is a whole continent which has been betrayed. The white man has in the main not sought to enlighten, to show the hideousness of sin, to point the better way, but upon the evil fires of paganism he has poured gin so that the smouldering ashes have leaped into destroying flame. The slavery which was one of the most horrible products of paganism he did not try to abolish, but himself stole and bought human beings; in all one hundred million souls.
The history of the African rum traffic would seem to take forever from England and Germany and the United States their boasted name of Christian. Upon the heart of our Doctor Day this fearful evil lay with a heavy weight. Said he:
[Sidenote: The Traffic in Gin.] “Within a stone’s throw of us lay a large steamer laden to the water’s edge with rum. When we remember that one of these steamers carries four thousand tons of freight and that hundreds of them are running to the country laden with rum, the very vilest that chemistry can invent and concoct, we may have some conception of what it means, not only to the heathen, but to missionaries at work there. At the mouth of every river and stream wherever there is a rod of beach smooth enough to land, the traffic goes on. In the name of God, in the name of all that is high and holy, why do not the owners of these ships, who live in luxury in Boston, Liverpool, Hamburg and London, paint their ships black and run up the black flag, or better still, nail it to the mast? Never pirate sailed the seas whose crimes were so black as the crimes now perpetrated on this continent in the name of commerce.