blow at the slave-trade in its very cradle and origin; and, through the slave-trade, at slavery in all its developments. It is the only modern unbelligerent attempt of which we are aware, to cure and conquer this sad disease of humanity. It may fail, as everything else may which is in the hands of mortal agents. The traveller, it is probable, may not be entirely correct in all his speculations. The rude physical force of nature, in the primitive form of the snout of a hippopotamus, may stave the delicate steam-launch in which science, trade, and charity mean to explore the Zambesi. An inopportune cascade at an undiscovered point may put out all the calculations of the voyage, or a sudden fever may strike the party into helplessness. Still, notwithstanding, here remains the idea, which is indestructible, and partially worked out. Congress it self, in its stormiest midnight discussion, would not dare to present its revolver to the breast of Livingstone. He is not an Abolitionist, nor a FreeSoiler; he is not even one of those earnest and eager philanthropists, on whose labour of love experience and time have begun to throw clouds, which it is to be hoped further time and expanded experience will lighten the slave-emancipators of our own West Indian possessions. There is no war in his thoughts, nor in his enterprise. But if his promises are to be depended on-and they seem to carry reason with them, as well as strong confirmatory evidence-and his conclusions are trustworthy, a matter which we can more easily judge for ourselves there is in the hope and project of Dr Livingstone a work which will nullify defeat, and make useless the whole system of slavery. This is a great thing to say-and so long as the plan remains almost wholly a theoretical and untried one, it may look like a brag and piece of boasting. How Dr Livingstone's savages may answer to the motives and necessities of civilisation-whether there is industry and courage in them sufficient to make free labour practicable and satisfactory-how far Sekeletu in the desert is superior to Quashee in the islands-are all questions unresolved

and doubtful. These, however, do not alter the great conception which has impelled the missionary to his unparalleled toils. He may be wrong or mistaken; but if he is not, he seems to have got a real hold upon the end of the clue which may lead us through all the intricate mazes which environ it, to the very innermost fortress and citadel of slavery, there to build in and wall up the decrepid giant, where he can oppress

a race no more.

Impelled by his two great ideasto make a road to the coast, and to find out a healthy and practicable site for a central settlement and metropolis of civilisation-Dr Livingstone, with a train of native assistants and attendants, all of whom seem to have had soul enough to understand so far his immediate object, and who were perfectly alive to the importance of a good price and open market for their ivory, set out from the primitive capital of his Makololo chief, towards the Portuguese settlement of Loando, on the west coast. This journey was only so far successful that it was accomplished in safety, though at the cost of many privations and a great deal of suffering. The party, which was a large one, made their way, after leaving the upper part of the great river, which carried them on so far in comparative comfort, from village to village, across an unknown country. The account is interesting and full of incident; it is not, however, particularly promising in respect to the early effect produced upon these savage races by their first contact with Europeans. As soon as the travellers emerge from the unexplored country, where neither chief nor people have ever seen a white man, the natives whom they encounter become avaricious, grasping, and untrustworthy-the primitive usage of hospitality ceases, and even for the poor provisions with which they are scantily supplied, the demand of "a man, a gun, or an ox," is made incessantly. This is, however, “the slave-path," which accounts for everything the slave-traders who traverse it being compelled, by the nature of their traffic and of the country, wild as it is, and offering every facility

for the escape of their victims, to yield to perpetual exactions from the inhabitants. In spite of all this, however, and through the greatest sufferings and dangers, Dr Livingstone and his party at last reached the Portuguese settlement, where the heart of the missionary was rejoiced by the sight and kindness of an Englishman, and where the Makololo made themselves acquainted with the marvels of civilisation. They went back with guns, clothing, and presents, full of complacency and importance, feeling themselves "the true ancients, who had reached to the end of the world." But their leader conducted them home with a mind still dissatisfied and inquiring; it was clear that his "highway" of civilisation could not be made to Loando. Those steaming swamps and tropical forests, bound into impenetrability by immense creepers, which could only be cut through by a hatchet, were totally impracticable. He had neither found the healthy region, nor the road to the coast.

Accordingly, after a toilsome and fever-obstructed return, the indefatigable traveller set out again upon a second journey from the same point, Linyanti, the town of Sekeletu, with another escort of natives, and bound to the other side of the continent, hoping to trace the course of the Zambesi, and quite undaunted by the non-success of his first endeavour. This last journey is the climax and conclusion of the work, so far as it has yet advanced. All the discoveries of immediate importance, so far as the missionary's large schemes of benevolent statesmanship went, were made during its course; and Dr Livingstone had the satisfaction of finding himself right and justified in both his great hopes for Africa. He found, and skirted for a long distance, the river which had inspired him with the thought of redemption for this helpless continent; and he found also upon its banks a region where he himself brightened into the exhilaration of restored health, where all the deleterious influences of climate were modified, and where, he feels convinced, European settlements could flourish, and might be established without fear. Having made

sure of both these inestimable facts to his own satisfaction, he went on with a light heart to the coast, leaving his convoy, until his return, to live and work among the Portuguese at Tete; and from Kilimane, on the East African coast, close to the delta of the Zambesi, at which point he will once again take up the thread of his labours, the adventurer returned into a world which had learned to know him, while he had very near forgotten it.

These, then, are the substantial results which he presents in justification of his own hopes, and of the endeavours to which he would anxiously persuade his countrymen. While he travelled and pondered through the African swamps and thickets, he did not know that the insatiate maw of the British giant watered for more cotton, and that political economy and private enterprise were looking out anxiously for new soil fit to produce the precious material which at present gives an undesirable monopoly to the American slaveholders; but he did convince himself that his Africa was not only a cotton-consuming but a cotton-producing soil, able to repay largely the efforts of any enterprising labourers who gave its capabilities a fair trial. The acknowledged deficiency put new heart into the wearied traveller. He had seen beforehand how valuable would be the check of this new and productive field upon the old slave-ground; but as the necessity increases, the advantage grows with it. Then there is indigo growing wild, a precious weed, over the unregarded soil-plantations of sugar-cane so extensive that our traveller says of one, 4000 men eating it during two days did not finish the whole"-coffee possible in most places, and in some actually accomplished, not to speak of physics without end, wholesome senna, beloved of nurseries, and precious quinine. All this Dr Livingstone offers us, with healthy quarters, lovely scenery, abundant food, neighbours neither ferocious nor intractable by nature, and deeply impressed with the importance of our national character, on the banks of his noble Zambesi, only a few days from the

sea. The offer is certainly very tempting. There is sufficient draught of water everywhere for a Thames steamer, and seams of coal in convenient proximity to supply these handy little demons with their indispensable food; and there is air which English lungs can safely breathe, and a sun not too scorching for English constitutions to bear. If Dr Livingstone is right, a European colonist might reach his healthful African home, even through the dangerous fringe of that unwholesome coast, with little greater danger than any man encounters who has to pass through a marshy or malarious district on his way home; while the natural gifts of this territory, at present of little use even to its scanty and barbarous inhabitants, seem almost inexhaustible. Add to all this the certainty that our trade and our merchants cannot go thither without carrying inevitable advantages with them that the first cotton-plantation in Africa tended by freemen will be the first real and effectual stroke at the "institution" of slavery-more effectual and real than any sudden scheme of local emancipation; and there can be little doubt that Dr Livingstone's scheme calls for the most serious attention from his own country and the civilised world.

And it does not seem easy to perceive on the surface any particular resemblance of character between the native tribes of the African desert and the "typical negro" of the civilised imagination. Dr Livingstone's clients are unquestionable savages; but they are not the gay, merry, thoughtless, inconsequent Sambos, music and laughter-loving, of the American plantations, nor the indolent and insolent drones of the West Indian Islands. Perhaps the race is a different race before it comes through that alembic of slavery, which transmutes its better metal, and leaves a stain even upon the dross which it needs generations to wear away. If British enterprise prepared the field only to fill it with a new and abundant crop of this wholly impracticable_animal, all the charms with which Dr Livingstone has endowed his newly-explored

dominions would be insufficient to justify the experiment. But the negro of civilisation-the actual or the emancipated slave-seems, so far as we are able to judge from the sketches of Dr Livingstone, a perfectly inadequate representative of the native African. The Makololo who accompanied the missionary to Loando, not only persevered with very tolerable courage through that painful journey, but on their arrival there set themselves to work, as soon as they found out how they could do it, with a most praiseworthy and honourable alacrity. They became woodcutters, and drove a flourishing trade, maintaining themselves by their own exertions. On his second and more successful expedition the result was the same, though, as that must be reckoned only half completed, our information is less full. Their conduct in regard to their leader seems to have been perfectly honest, faithful, and exemplary; and even the strangers among whom he fell on his road, behaved, on the whole, with great discretion and very tolerable kindness. There seems, indeed, no ground to suppose that these reasonable savages, whose wits are sharpened by a constant struggle against all the rude necessities of nature, could be transmogrified by a good fortune, which came in the shape of active employment and stimulated industry, into such an unreflective and frivolous being as the contented slave or the idle freedman of Jamaica. On this, however, must depend, in a very great measure, the success of the experiment, which seems otherwise so promising.

But it is necessary to remember that the first motive of the missionary is not the spread of trade, the increase of valuable produce, or the extension of the markets of the world. His primary object is the benefit of these same voiceless savages, for whom no one else takes much regard. It was to secure their ignorance against the devices of the slave-trader, to expand their intelligence, and to influence their hearts, that Livingstone set out upon his long journey. It was the earnestness of his solicitude for them that kept him undiscouraged in the failure

of his first enterprise; it was the same untiring regard which prompted him to set out once more on a second expedition; and it is that which now carries him back, with all his hopes of an opened country and a beginning trade, to resume his labours among them. It is clear, therefore, that he has no particular dread of making a Quashee of his Makololo, and that the idea of improving, civilising, and elevating this race, is no Utopian thought to the individual who knows them best. Religion has never before made so great a testimony to honourable English commerce and its beneficial results as by thus calling in its aid, as the strongest auxiliary of its own efforts; and never has made a stronger protest against the iniquitous trade of the man-stealer, than by these extraordinary individual efforts to supplant and defeat him. By so much as Dr Livingstone's enterprise is not a purely missionary one, it is a directly Anti-slavery expedition-an aim at the heart of that peculiar institution. He may be wrong-he is probably not so much wiser than all his fellow-creatures as to be infallibly correct in all his conclusions. It may be much harder than Dr Livingstone supposes to gain possession of this continent, or to turn its riches to account; but if there is only so much truth in his discoveries as it is reasonable to expect from the candid researches of an honest and good man, the issues are scarcely to be limited.

And it is pleasant to find how entirely our name and national character are vindicated, so far as Africa is concerned, from all share in this abominable traffic or, we should rather say, how clearly our antagonism is understood. The black slavetraders, themselves a native tribe little more enlightened than the other tribes on whom they manage to impose, show an edifying sense of the vigilance of the British cruisers; and on one occasion, at least, fled precipitately from the face of the British missionary, their natural enemy and conqueror. They had come to trade, a large party, at Linyanti, while Dr Livingstone was absent; but hearing of his residence there, and expected

return, and panic-struck by the sight of some natives with hats which he had given them, they struck their tents in haste, and fled by night, while the dreaded missionary was still sixty miles off, and entirely unaware of their vicinity. An English hat is not a very graceful head-dress-one must suppose it a rather whimsical apex to the person of a half-naked Makololo-but in this case at least the article did good service, and the story is a very pleasant one.

We have touched but very slightly upon Dr Livingstone's book, as indeed it is rather late to enter upon any detailed examination of a work which has already been distributed and read so largely. Nor was our concern so much with this publication as with himself-his motives and his errand, a singular exposition of the missionary enterprise and vocation. There is very little in the volume of what is commonly called missionary experience, and indeed for the last three or four years which he spent in Africa, the explorer must have had small leisure, save by his own life and conversation, for teaching or preaching. One thing he did wherever he travelled-he left at least one statement of the Gospel which he carried in every village that received him; and he tells with satisfaction how his earliest convert at Kolobeng-the station which he was compelled to abandon - "Black Sechele," an upright and honest savage, the chief of a tribe of Bechuanas-had taken upon himself the office of teacher, and supplied the missionary's lack of service by his own effectual labours, which seems to have been no small consolation to Dr Livingstone. But the traveller's own sentiments upon missionary labour are valuable and interesting, and more in our way at present than the details of his own exertions. He is strongly opposed to the prevalent habit of placing mission-stations near each other on the skirts of a great untouched country; he finds his brethren disposed to cling too closely to the borders of civilisation, where they are at least not quite beyond the reach of the English tongue, and a visitor now and then out of the world, and where they are tempted

to nurse a sprinkling of converts into over-delicate and demonstrative Christianity. Dr Livingstone is jealous, as Paul was, of building upon another man's foundation. He is anxious to see the messengers of the Church pushing forward into new ground; and he thinks it safer even to go away, leaving the Bible behind him, and the faculty of reading it, and trusting God alone for the issue, than to watch and tend one corner too narrowly while another still lies waste. In these sentiments, one cannot help believing, many a generous young mind ready for such labour, but damped by the close discouraging scrutiny for immediate personal fruit of a missionary's labours, and perhaps offended by details too narrow and particular, must answer with ready enthusiasm; and we do not doubt that good results must follow from so energetic a break upon the old routine, which makes the work of the missionary rather the cultivation of a little bit of artificial garden in the desert, than an apostolic enterprise, rapid, bold, impressive, and startling, which left footmarks on every soil it crossed, and laid the charge and responsibility of the preservation of the faith upon every man who held it, and not upon the one solitary stranger who remained among them. Yet the Apostles were the truest and most successful of all missionaries; and we cannot but believe with Livingstone, that a man has done no small amount of service, even to a savage people, when he leaves among their huts the Bible and the art of reading, even though he cannot remain with them to nurse the tenderer souls and serve the rest.

Nor can Dr Livingstone, who knows our system and its workings thoroughly, refrain, on the other hand, from a half sigh of admiration over the old Jesuit establishments of which he found traces in the Portuguese

province of Angola, where a kindly remembrance of these missionaries lingered; and where, like the garden flowers of an old enclosure, reading and writing still remained almost common accomplishments, surviving tokens of where the teachers had been. The English missionary, accustomed to the solitary small stipend of the London Society, and the work of all kinds which the lonely Christian in the desert must turn his own individual hand to, could not think but with a consciousness of its many excellent uses, of the Christian community instead of the individual

the little brotherhood of differing gifts and qualifications, of whom one could explore, and one observe, and one preach, while all worked together towards the same end. Do people need to be Jesuits before they can be unanimous in a pursuit so important? or is it impracticable to make a brotherhood of married Protestant missionaries as harmonious as a brotherhood of Catholic celibates? or is it only that, rejecting the evils of that ancient system, we must needs reject the good along with them, like true human creatures and pugnacious British citizens? It is not easy to tell-perhaps there is a certain amount of truth in all the three suppositions. Dr Livingstone, however, without considering any of them, gives a sigh to the old Jesuits of Angola. He would rather see them there again, than see the ground vacant as it is; and he commends with a generous envy the wisdom with which they have chosen their sites and established their communities-those communities which exist no longer, but which one might suppose, in their better features, it was still in our power to emulate. Might not the plan be worth consideration? for half-a-dozen must be better than two; and two, we have the highest authority for saying, are better than one.

VOL. LXXXIII.-NO. DX.

2 E