ems to be the rule in all history that the elevation of a lower race
is effected only by contact with one higher in civilization. Both reform
and progress come from exterior influences. This is axiomatic, and
applies to the fields of government, religion, ethics, art, and letters.

We have been taught to regard Africa as a dark, stolid continent,
unawakened, unvisited by the agencies and influences that have
transformed the world from age to age. Yet it was in northern and
northeastern Africa that within historic periods three of the most
powerful and brilliant civilizations were developed,--the Egyptian, the
Carthaginian, the Saracenic. That these civilizations had more than a
surface contact with the interior, we know. To take the most ancient of
them, and that which longest endured, the Egyptian, the Pharaohs carried
their conquests and their power deep into Africa. In the story of their
invasions and occupancy of the interior, told in pictures on temple
walls, we find the negro figuring as captive and slave. This contact may
not have been a fruitful one for the elevation of the negro, but it
proves that for ages he was in one way or another in contact with a
superior civilization. In later days we find little trace of it in the
home of the negro, but in Egypt the negro has left his impress in the
mixed blood of the Nile valley.

The most striking example of the contact of the negro with a higher
civilization is in the powerful medieval empire of Songhay, established
in the heart of the negro country. The vast strip of Africa lying north
of the equator and south of the twentieth parallel and west of the upper
Nile was then, as it is now, the territory of tribes distinctly described
as Negro. The river Niger, running northward from below Jenne to near
Timbuctoo, and then turning west and south to the Gulf of Guinea, flows
through one of the richest valleys in the world. In richness it is
comparable to that of the Nile and, like that of the Nile, its fertility
depends upon the water of the central stream. Here arose in early times
the powerful empire of Songhay, which disintegrated and fell into tribal
confusion about the middle of the seventeenth century. For a long time
the seat of its power was the city of Jenne; in later days it was
Timbuctoo.

This is not the place to enlarge upon this extraordinary piece of
history. The best account of the empire of Songhay is to be found in the
pages of Barth, the German trave