“The slave-traders admit they have only 2,300 captives in this fold, yet they have raided through the length and breadth of a country larger than Ireland, bearing fire and spreading carnage with lead and iron. Both banks of the river show that 118 villages and 43 districts have been devastated, out of which is only educed this scant profit of 2,300 females and children, and about 2,000 tusks of ivory! The spears, swords, bows, and the quivers of arrows show that many adults have fallen. Given that these 118 villages were peopled only by 1,000 each, we have only a profit of two per cent.; and by the time all these captives have been subjected to the accidents of the river voyage to Kirundu and Nyangwé, of camp-life and its harsh miseries, to the havoc of small-pox and the pests which miseries breed, there will only remain a scant one per cent. upon the bloody venture. “They tell me, however, that the convoys already arrived at Nyangwé with slaves captured in the interior have been as great as their present band. Five expeditions have come and gone with their booty of ivory and slaves, and these five expeditions have now completely weeded the large territory described above. If each expedition has been as successful as this, the slave-traders have been enabled to send 5,000 women and children safe to Nyangwé, Kirundu and Vibondo, above the Stanley Falls. Thus 5,000 out of an assumed million will be at the rate of a half per cent., or five slaves out of 1,000 people. “This is poor profit out of such large waste of life, for originally we assume the slaves to have mustered about 10,000 in number. To obtain the 2,300 slaves out of the 118 villages they must have shot a round number of 2,500 people, while 1,300 more died by the wayside, through scant provisions and the intensity of their hopeless wretchedness. How many are wounded and die in the forest or droop to death through an overwhelming sense of their calamities, we do not know; but if the above figures are trustworthy, then the outcome from the territory with its million of souls is 5,000 slaves obtained at the cruel expense of 33,000 lives! And such slaves! They are females, or, young children who cannot run away, or who with youthful indifference, will soon forget the terrors of their capture! Yet each of the very smallest infants has cost the life of a father and perhaps his three stout brothers and three grown-up daughters. An entire family of six souls would have been done to death to obtain that small, feeble, useless child!