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 possible, however, that pressure from civilization in the Nile valley and rising culture around Lake Chad was at this time reenforced by expansion of the Yoruba-Benin culture on the west coast.  Perhaps, too, developing culture around the Great Lakes in the east beckoned or the riotous fertility of the Congo valleys became known.  At any rate the movement commenced, now by slow stages, now in wild forays.  There may have been a preliminary movement from east to west to the Gulf of Guinea.  The main movement, however, was eastward, skirting the Congo forests and passing down by the Victoria Nyanza and Lake Tanganyika.  Here two paths beckoned:  the lakes and the sea to the east, the Congo to the west.  A great stream of men swept toward the ocean and, dividing, turned northward and fought its way down the Nile valley and into the Abyssinian highlands; another branch turned south and approached the Zambesi, where we shall meet it again.

Another horde of invaders turned westward and entered the valley of the Congo in three columns.  The northern column moved along the Lualaba and Congo rivers to the Cameroons; the second column became the industrial and state-building Luba and Lunda peoples in the southern Congo valley and Angola; while the third column moved into Damaraland and mingled with Bushman and Hottentot.