FROM ADDRESS OF REV. GEO. S. DICKERMAN.
As we review the past, we delight to see how the various movements, which, at the time, seem to be wholly disconnected, move on in converging lines, and how, finally, those movements come together to produce some sublime result. During this centennial period we have been looking back over the past history of our nation, and at the same time over the past history of Europe, and we have found these two histories blended all the way through. From the time of the Crusades, and the awakening of the spirit of enterprise, and the creating of that great restlessness throughout Europe which led to the spirit of exploration and discovery, down through the subsequent periods, during which our country was colonized, we see everywhere how movements on this side of the water and movements on the other side were playing together. * * * * * * * * * And now we stand at another period, and we see two continents, lying side by side across the same ocean. We have heard God’s voice saying, “Let my people go,” and this has been followed by God’s providence breaking off the fetters of an oppressed race and bidding them go forth into a land of freedom. And we have seen, in connection with this, God calling His people to labor and lift up these brethren to a higher intelligence, to a purer, faith, to a nobler aspiration, and to a grander enterprise; and we have seen these efforts fruiting most wonderfully. And all the time that this has been going on, away off there across the ocean, in that new continent hitherto unexplored, Baker, Livingstone and Stanley, with untiring industry, have been prosecuting their work; and “the great dark continent” is being made a light continent in one respect—light to our knowledge, only that something greater and grander may follow. Are these lines parallel—the lines of God’s movements in America and the lines of God’s movements in Africa? They converge; and, in the distance, these lines on which God is moving will come to their focus, and we shall see there on African soil sublime results, of which these here on American soil give to us but the prophecy.
THE UPPER NILE BASIN.
COL. H. G. PROUT, LATE OF THE KEHDIVE’S STAFF, EGYPT.
In what I have to say I shall not try to give any large picture of African travel or life; I shall try only to give some accurate notions of a limited area.
The Soudan is not a definite geographical term. Bellad es Soudan is the country of the blacks, and is merely a general term like Central Africa. An Egyptian Governor-General of the Soudan rules a vast territory, extending in Gordon’s time from the Tropic of Cancer on the north to near the equator on the south, about 1,640 miles; and from the Red Sea on the east to the western boundary of Darfour, averaging about 660 miles in width. This territory includes Upper and Lower Nubia, the fertile and little known Sennaar, the wastes north of Abyssinia, the provinces of Darfour and Kordofan, and the mysterious regions of the White Nile and its affluents.
Nowhere else in the explored world is there an equal area so uniform in climate and surface. The sad result of this uniformity you see in the condition of the people. In your effort to help the people, you must fight against these facts of nature. A monotony of savage tribes live in a bad climate, uniform in its badness; they inhabit a land which throughout great regions gives no variety of surface. From these conditions they have no escape. I do not say that no great improvement of people so situated is possible; but I do say that man has seldom found himself in a worse position.
In the northern zone of the Soudan, down to about the twelfth degree of latitude, the climate has admitted of a feeble development of Mohammedan civilization; further south the conditions are desperate.
The Arab officers of the Khedive, the Nubian slave hunters, the few European traders and travelers who have gone as far as Gondokoro, the handful of American and English officers who, in late years, have tried to carry law and light into that unhappy country—every man of them would tell you the same story of more or less rapid failure of his own vital powers, and of the terrible mortality among his comrades. We, at this distance, only hear of those who go up the Nile and come back. One has but to spend a few weeks in Khartoum to learn a long list of names of men who have gone as far as Khartoum or Fashoda, or the Sobat or Lado, only to come back, broken in health, often to die before getting to the sea.