When Stanley, in 1877, intrusting his life and fortunes to a mighty and unknown stream, voyaged toward the very heart of the Dark Continent, even his wildest dreams could not have foreshadowed results equal to the reality of a near future. His voyage in its potentiality was second only to that of Columbus, as the outcome of the succeeding five years plainly indicates. All Europe, alive to the commercial importance of the Congo Basin, hastened to reach its borders or encroach on its limits by means of enlarged dependent colonies; commerce and religion, hand in hand, traversed its rivers by steam and lined its banks with beneficent settlements, while the merciless Arab devastated its villages and dragged its decimated natives into slavery. Then came a political wonder--the peaceful creation of a vast tropical empire more than a million square miles in area, the Congo Free State, erected and admitted into the community of nations by act of an international conference, in which participated fourteen European powers and the United States, our own country being fittingly the first to officially acknowledge the existence of the new state its adventurous citizen had given to the world. [Illustration: Emin Pasha.] The voyage through the Dark Continent was obviously potent of future results, and Gambetta, in 1878, clearly forecast the effects of Stanley's journey. The great French statesman said: "Not only have you opened up a new continent to our view, but you have given influence to scientific and philanthropic enterprises which will have its effect on the progress of the world. What you have done has interested governments--proverbially so difficult to move--and the impulse you have imparted, I am convinced, will go on year after year."