and its tributaries, and the lake region. The more we learn of equatorial Africa, the greater its natural advantages appear to be. The rivers open up the country in a favorable manner for trade and settlement. Its elevation from 2,000 to 3,000 feet will render it healthy, though this elevation is only equal to from ten degrees to fourteen degrees of north latitude. Here all the fruits of the torrid zone, the fruits and most of the grains of the temperate zone, cotton, India-rubber, and sugar-cane, are found.
The country has been unhealthly, a great many Europeans have died, and few have been able to remain more than two or three years without returning to Europe to recuperate. These facts seem to show that the climate is not healthy for Europeans. But the mortality has been much greater than it will be when the country is settled and the unhealthy stations have been exchanged for healthier localities. Every new country has its peculiar dangers, which must be discovered. When these obstacles are understood and overcome, Europeans will probably occupy all this region, and it will become a European colony.
If European colonization is successful, European civilization will come into contact with African barbarism. Where such a contest is carried on in a country where the climate is equally favorable to the two races, it can only result in the subjugation or destruction of the inferior race. If the climate is unfavorable to the white population, then, unless the inferior is subjected to the superior, the white population will fail in colonizing the country, and the Negro will either slowly emerge from barbarism, or return to his original condition.
The Negro has never developed any high degree of civilization; and even if, when brought into contact with civilization, he has made considerable progress, when that contact ceased he has deteriorated into barbarism. But, on the other hand, he has never faded away and disappeared, like the Indian of America and the natives of the Southern Archipelago.
Nature has spread a bountiful and never-ending harvest before the Negro, and given to him a climate where neither labor of body or mind, neither clothing nor a house, is essential to his comfort. All nature invites to an idle life; and it is only through compulsion, and contact with a life from without, that his condition can be improved.
In Africa a contest is going on between civilization and barbarism, Christianity and Mohammedanism, freedom and slav-
