Emin replied in his deep, sonorous voice: “You have touched perhaps the most painful wound from which the welfare and civilization of this region, so richly blest by Nature, are suffering. But where shall one begin to cure the evil? The negro people of the interior sell their prisoners, captured in their petty wars, and look upon it as their surest source of revenue. The Niam-Niam and other tribes simply eat their prisoners, and it is surely a step in advance if they sell instead of eat the unlucky victims. Those Arab hordes which have invaded the Soudan from Egypt and Nubia with their hireling soldiers are the worst. They have established fortified stations from which they systematically conduct their hunting expeditions. “The Nile officials should not let them escape with their black plunder, but no Egyptian or Turk can resist ‘backsheesh,’ and they know a thousand ways in which they can transport their black freight by night to the shores of the Red Sea and get it into Arabia. Those slaves which are actually sold for household servants are often better off, for most of the Moslems are kind to their servants. There is not much work for them, for every household has from twenty to thirty and sometimes fifty servants and they stay with the family to the end of their lives, for the Turks consider it dishonorable to sell their servants. But man-hunting is not the less objectionable on that account, and yet how are these dealers to support themselves? The government has monopolized the ivory business and there is nothing else to be found in the interior. The Moslems have learned no kind of hand work and they would rather starve than do it. I have driven that hangman’s brood from my domain, but it was not accomplished without hard fighting. You can hardly imagine what a multitude of lazy, useless vagabonds live upon the poor negroes. “The people supply them with ivory, grain of various kinds, honey, wax, and butternut oil, but none of this comes to the government storehouse. It is all lavished in the most scandalous manner by the officials upon their hangers-on and dependents. These people not only pay for nothing, but they take everything they can. In the Amadi district, for instance, there are at least ten thousand negroes, and they had to support two thousand good-for-nothings by their field labor, for they have neither hunting nor live stock. They did not even allow these poor men to work quietly in their fields. If any complaint was made, in two days five hundred of them were carried off. But I have subdued them by fire and sword, and to-day my negroes enjoy their possessions and their families are brought up without the fear that their half-grown children will be carried off by brute force.