STANLEY'S PYGMIES.
THE orders for Stanley's forthcoming book, say the reporters in their preposterous English, "are already phenomenal," and no wonder. Nothing in modern history or fiction, nothing in recent adventure or in Mr. Haggard's novels, has so excited the general imagination of reading mankind as the explorer's continual references to the pygmies whom he discovered and fought with and studied 'lithe depths of the Aruwhimi forest. He tells us, it is true, painfully little in his speeches, reserving all details, with a natural but tantalising economy, for his great book ; but he says quite enough to awaken an overpowering curiosity to know more of what must be the most marvellous scene now existing in the world. Read with intelligent eyes only one of his descriptions, that which on Monday night, at th'e reception of the Geographical Society, hushed the eight thousand guests who thronged the Albert Hall into strained attention. Over a country half as large again as France, covered with huge trees—ten thousand millions of them, calculates the traveller himself—standing so thick that it is always twilight below their interwoven branches, wander in thousands, and have wandered for three thousand years at least, a race of light-brown men and women—their colour, says Mr. Stanley, is that of half-baked bricks- aca,rcely four feet high. Ages before Herodotus was born, they retreated before larger races, as the Lapps, who are nearly as small, retreated before the Norsemen ; and in the course of centuries, they have so fitted themselves to their environment that the dreary forest, where full light never falls, and every shadow across the sun produces a kind of penetrable night, has become to them the world, limitless, edgeless, vast beyond their power to think of emerging from its protecting gloom. They know of nothing beyond it ,even by tradition, have no idea of the great prairies outside, have never seen grass growing in quantities, cannot to all appearance conceive a country in which trees are not, or in which movement does not involve a painful threading through the bush. The earth for them every- where bears forest. The only spaces they know are the finial' oases, where larger natives have made clearances in Which to plant gardens of the banana, which in this climate reaches maturity in twelve months, and serves all the purposes of the cereals in more fortunate lands. The little people, taught by ages of experience, know their forests thoroughly, can tell exactly what is edible and what poisonous, and can find food everywhere ; but the bananas draw them irresistibly from the lonelier depths. They plant their villages around the oases in order to get the fruit, sometimes paying the cultivators by the services as trackers and watchmen, which their superior knowledge of the woods enables them to offer, but more frequently fending without leave on crops that are practically inex- haustible. They are in their way intelligent, possess a language, are gifted with all the knowledge of the forest, and can, when they please, make themselves dangerous, appearing and disappearing as suddenly and almost as silently as the very snakes themselves. They impeded and endangered Stanley more than all the tribes he met of the usual human size. They have enmities, friendships, virtues, and vices, are in all respects human beings, and human beings with a certain force in them, for they have remained undefeated by the horrible circumstances around them all through the historic life of man, if not for untold centuries beyond ; and yet they live almost precisely the life of the tribes of baboons found by another explorer almost in the same region, and to all appearance will lead it until the intrusive white man, his brain fired with a desire for limitless timber to be cut without paying royalties, begins the work of felling the forest which is the only home they know, and which, if antiquity of possession can constitute title, is and has always been theirs.
Is it theirs ? Radicals could hardly utilise better the fe* hours in which they are not reading or hearing or making comparatively sterile speeches, than in thinking oiit to the end some of the problems presented by the little folk of the Aruwhimi forest, who have never changed, and if let alone never will change, any more than the animal tribes, and. who yet are as human as themselves. They, the politicians, declare every day that the law af humanity is progress, and decide every question which they do decide—say, one in a hundred— by the reassertion of that first datum of modern thought ; but how does their law appear, tried by the history of these pygmies who are human, and even "intelligent," but who throughout the whole history of man have not advanced one step, who do not even grow the bananas they are so hungry: to eat, who sow no corn and keep no stock, and in centuries of conflict have not learned how to keep themselves secure ? Here at least we have a race which neither advances nor perishes, which is not taught by necessity and learns nothing of value from experience, but lives on unchanged, unaffected by all the influences which the Radicals tell us in so many speeches are urging forward mankind towards some unknown goal. If the pygmies have never progressed, with their fertile soil, and warm climate, and magnificent rivers, then it is clear that progress is not a universal law of humanity, but only a law obeyed by certain peoples under certain circumstances, possibly, though not certainly, for very limited periods. That is a very different fixed datum for thought from the one which doctrinaire Radicals now accept, and the change from one to the other would materially modify many speculations. If, for instance, the pygmies left to themselves would never improve, which is clearly the only possible deduction from present evidence, are they not entitled to the great advantage of being conquered by a race which could give them an opportunity of progressing ? We believe that proposition to be true of all Africa ; but it is constantly denied, and we want to know if those who deny it will extend their denial to this extreme case of the pygmies. Ought these little folk, probably not a quarter of a million in number, who do not advance, or show the slightest promise of advancing, to be allowed to shut out the progressive races from a magnificent country which its possessors do not use, and which yields a product almost essential to man ? The forest "belongs,", on the Radical hypothesis, to the pygmies, and the trees ought to be left for three thousand more years, to grow and fall and rot as they have done for the previous three thousand years that have elapsed since rumours of these strange people first reached civilised ears. The supply of timber in the civilised world is rapidly growing insufficient. Europe may be said to be denuded already, and America is rapidly being stripped; but here are ten thousand million trees waiting only for the beneficent axe which, in destroying the forest, makes it capable of cultivation. May the civilised races take those trees, or must they be left to shelter for ever the little people who have wandered for such ages under their shade, and who clearly, if any people ever owned a country they could not use, own the forest of the Aruwhimi? The answer to that question involves the morality of all that is now taking place in Africa, and much of which offends so many " advanced " minds. We know quite well what the answer from events will be ; but then, events are often as immoral as the Norman Conquest, and we want the answer from those who try to regulate national con- duct by some rule of right. Our own answer is clear : that when conquest raises the conquered, or palpably benefits the world, conquest is a permitted weapon. But that answer as yet is accepted only by those who act. Those who reason without acting will not accept it, and we want to know what alternative they are prepared to suggest. They have here before them an absolutely crucial case. If the self-government theory is true everywhere and for all men, then the greatest forest on earth, and the vast country it renders useless, ought to remain for ever at the disposal of the race of little men who were threading its narrow aisles before Herodotus heard that such a people were believed to exist. No right can be so perfect as theirs, or more injurious to mankind; but is the latter fact to be taken into consideration ? If it is, then the English may justifiably govern East Africa from the Mediterranean to the Zambesi for a century or two, with no fear of doing wrong save by unjust or deteriorating government ; but if not, not.
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