of
four hundred thousand dollars, of which she received less than one hundred
thousand dollars in actual cash. Finally the Liberians turned to the
United States for capital and protection. As a result the Liberian customs
have been put under international control and Major Charles Young, the
ranking Negro officer in the United States army, with several colored
assistants, has been put in charge of the making of roads and drilling a
constabulary to keep order in the interior.

To-day Liberia has an area of forty thousand square miles, about three
hundred and fifty miles of coast line, and an estimated total population
of two million of which fifty thousand are civilized. The revenue amounted
in 1913 to $531,500. The imports in 1912 were $1,667,857 and the exports
$1,199,152. The latter consisted chiefly of rubber, palm oil and kernels,
coffee, piassava fiber, ivory, ginger, camwood, and arnotto.

Perhaps Liberia's greatest citizen was the late Edward Wilmot Blyden, who
migrated in early life from the Danish West Indies and became a prophet of
the renaissance of the Negro race.

Turning now from Guinea we pass down the west coast. In 1482 Diego Cam of
Portugal, sailing this coast, set a stone at the mouth of a great river
which he called "The Mighty," but which eventually came to be known by the
name of the powerful Negro kingdom through which it flowed--the Congo.

We must think of the valley of the Congo with its intricate interlacing of
water routes and jungle of forests as a vast caldron shut away at first
from the African world by known and unknown physical hindrances. Then it
was penetrated by the tiny red dwarfs and afterward horde after horde of
tall black men swirled into the valley like a maelstrom, moving usually
from north to east and from south to west.

The Congo valley became, therefore, the center of the making of what we
know to-day as the Bantu nations. They are not a unified people, but a
congeries of tribes of considerable physical diversity, united by the
compelling bond of language and other customs imposed on the conquered by
invading conquerors.

The history or these invasions we must to-day largely imagine. Between two
and three thousand years ago the wilder tribes of Negroes began to move
out of the region south or southeast of Lake Chad. This was always a land
of shadows and legends, where fearful cannibals dwelt and where no
Egyptian or Ethiopian or Sudanese armies dared to go. It is possi