Gladstone was right. To all civilised peoples, but specially to men of Anglo-Saxon speech—Englishmen, who had given lavishly of their millions to free the slaves held in their colonies; Americans, who had poured out their blood like water in a similar cause—the accounts given by explorers and missionaries of the horrors of the slave trade, rampant in Central Africa, were as the smell of powder to the war-horse. Only a few people are interested in geography as a science. A vastly greater number are affected by a widening of the area for trade. But the effectual suppression of slavery is a question that comes home to everybody. No one can stand aside, indifferent to it. The ghastly horrors of the murderous raids made by the remorseless Arab slave-traders upon defenceless Central African villages, so graphically described by travellers, thrilled the civilised world. No effort was needed now to direct public attention to Africa. Africa loomed large in men’s minds; and the question of slavery, fondly thought to be for ever laid at rest by the tremendous conflict in America in the early sixties, again became a vital problem. [Sidenote: King Leopold’s Main Object.] Of the numerous activities which distinguish the character of Leopold II., philanthropy has the greater force. Much that is quite incontrovertible might be urged in support of this statement; but this is neither the place nor time to argue that matter. Suffice it to say here that upon no one did the revelations as to the methods of capture and subsequent treatment of Central African slaves make a deeper impression than upon King Leopold. As a lifelong student of Africa, and a geographer of rare attainments, in personal touch with all the authorities on the subject, his information was as accurate and complete as it was possible for it to be. Though the great European governments had compelled the Khedive of Egypt to exert himself to the utmost to repress slave-trading on the Upper Nile, and the complaisant Egyptian ruler had appointed first one Englishman and then another (Sir Samuel Baker and Charles Gordon, the latter being the ill-fated General of that name) to administer the government of the Soudan, and some good resulted, it was well known to King Leopold that south of the Equator to the Zambesi the slave trade continued to be prosecuted as vigorously as it had ever been in the remote past. How might the evil be stamped out? Or, if such a consummation were too much to hope for within the immediate future, how best might the evil be checked? In considering these questions, King Leopold very rightly concluded that the more thorough the knowledge of Central Africa possessed by Europeans the greater the possibility of success in their efforts to ameliorate the awful misery of its people.