per 1,000 strings, as compared with the uncut pieces of sheeting, or kegs of gunpowder, or flint-lock muskets, short and long. They could tell, by poising on the arm, what profit on an ivory tusk purchased at Langa-Langa, would be derived by sale at Stanley Pool. No wonder that all this commercial knowledge had left its traces on their faces; indeed it is the same as in your own cities in Europe. … It is the same in Africa, more especially on the Congo, where the people are so devoted to trade.
The "Venice of the Congo" has long since disappeared, and the "champion traders of the Congo" have perished miserably.
But this European trade was, after all, but a very small affair in the lives of the Congo peoples as a whole. Their own internal trade, industries, and avocations filled up most of their time. Their external trade intercourse, through a whole series of intermediaries, with the working classes of Europe, only affected a microscopic portion of the vast territory in which they dwelt. There is a copious literature enabling us to form an accurate estimate of the daily life of these promising races. We read of innumerable centres of population varying from 5,000 to 40,000; of settlements extending for hundreds of miles along the river banks; of communities of professional fishermen; others making a speciality of canoe building and fashioning brass-bound paddles; others proficient in pottery, basket-making, net-weaving, cane-splitting, carving wooden handles for hoes. We are shown a busy people manufacturing salt from the ashes of certain river reeds, and beer made from malted maize; making rat-traps and twine; digging and smelting iron; repairing thatch-roofed dwellings; turning out weapons for hunting and for war, often of singularly beautiful shape, the handles of battle-axes and knives tastefully and richly ornamented; weaving the fibres of various plants into mats and handsome clothes of raised pile, dyed and designed with remarkable artistic instinct. The village forge is everywhere to be seen; sometimes the tannery. We are shown towns and villages, surrounded with plantations—on land hardly won from the forest—of sugar-cane, maize, ground nuts, bananas, plantains, and manioca in variety; tobacco, many species of vegetables such as sweet potatoes tomatoes, vegetable marrows, "as finely kept as in Flanders," writes one enthusiastic Belgian explorer. "If civilisation," exclaims a French expert observer, "were measured by the number of vegetable conquests, these
