The Conversion of Andre Gide.

In 1925 Andre Gide, French writer, at the age of fifty-five, set out to realize a lifelong ambition to explore the region of the French Congo. Accompanied by a young disciple and an equipage of more than a hundred bearers, he began his journey, as he tells us in his journal, with the fullest expectation of "voluptuous delight, forgetfulness," enjoyment of blue skies and virgin forests. But almost on landing he met with certain things that produced on him a quite different effect. In the Ubangi country he saw "fifteen men and two women attached by the neck to a single rope, scarcely able to walk, escorted by two guards armed with five-thonged whips." He learned very soon that the colonial administration rules the blacks with an iron hand and that the French business concessions rule the administration. The sole function of the, administration appears to be to keep a hundred and twenty thousand blacks in virtual slavery by means of terror, bloodshed, and coercion. The inhabitants of the villages are "mobilized," as they were in the war, and the lives of some seventeen thousand of them are calmly sacrificed to build a railway.