stances and surroundings. This is especially required when the victims belong to a race whose skin is not white. We Europeans do not find it easy to understand that despite differences of colour, climate, and environment, the main channels along which travel the twin emotions of suffering and joy, are much the same in all races and peoples. Emotions are deeper, more sensitised with civilised man than is the case with uncivilised man: but the difference is only one of degree.
Roughly speaking, the region drained by the Congo and its affluents is, except in the extreme south-east, one huge forest bisected by innumerable waterways, and broken here and there with open spaces. Before the main river flings itself into the sea after traversing half Africa, its course is interrupted by a long series of cataracts, rendering navigation impossible. This natural obstacle had always hindered communication between the lower Congo and the vast regions of the interior, until Belgian enterprise turned it by constructing a railway round them. Nevertheless, a brisk commercial intercourse between the upper Congo and the outer world had grown up since the disappearance of the oversea slave trade. There were three principal intermediary agents to this trade: the European merchant settled in the lower river; the Ba-Congo (i.e., lower Congo) people, who acted as go-betweens, and the Batekes, settled about Stanley Pool at the head of the cataracts, who acted as middlemen for all the up-river tribes. The Ba-Congo carried goods up the line of cataracts from the lower river to Stanley Pool, and brought down the produce from the Batekes. The ramifications of this commercial intercourse penetrated to great distances, and native tribes as far inland as the Aruwimi—over 2,000 miles from the sea—were eager purchasers of the white man's goods before they had ever seen a white man's face. The chief article of import was cloth, which was ardently coveted; after cloth came satin strips, kettles, red baize, umbrellas, brass rods, iron cooking pots, pipes, looking glasses, rough knives, beads, snuff boxes, muskets, and powder. In exchange for these articles the natives bartered red-wood, camwood powder (a crimson cosmetic), wax, ivory, tin, copper, lead, and palm oil to which, in latter years, was added india-rubber, when the demand for that article developed in
