The Conquest of the Desert 



the British Isles ; the finest soul that has 

 lived and died for Africa. Other writers have 

 dealt with the missionary labours and epoch- 

 making discoveries of David Livingstone, but 

 none has so far shown that the dream of this 

 fearless traveller was not so much the conver- 

 sion of the savage, nor yet the search for the 

 fountains of the Nile, nor even the destruction 

 of the slave trade, but rather that these vast 

 startled solitudes should become the highways 

 of a benign civilisation and the happy homes 

 of industrious colonists. 



The father of David Livingstone was a small 

 tea-dealer, who died in the year 1856, while his 

 illustrious son was travelling homewards from 

 Zumbo on the Zambesi. Of his mother his 

 earliest recollection was an anxious housewife 

 striving to make both ends meet. Yet on their 

 tombstone in the cemetery of Hamilton he 

 thanked God " for Poor and Pious Parents." 

 In South Africa we are accustomed to hear that 

 crude and heartless doctrine that a welcome 

 should be extended only to those immigrants 

 in possession of 1000. It is indeed a pleasant 

 theory for the light weights of land settlement, 

 but so far as common-sense and Scottish emigra- 



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