42 DA VI D LIVINGSTONE. [chap. hi. 



may be spent as profitably as a pioneer as in any other 

 way." 



In his next letter to the London Missionary Society, 

 dated Kuruman, 23d September 1841, he gives his 

 impressions of the field, and unfolds an idea which took 

 hold of him at the very beginning, and never lost its 

 grip. It was, that there was not population enough 

 about the South to justify a concentration of missionary 

 labour there, and that the policy of the Society ought to 

 be one of expansion, moving out far and wide wherever 

 there was an opening, and making the utmost possible 

 use of native agency, in order to cultivate so wide a field. 

 In England he had thought that Kuruman might be 

 made a great missionary institute, whence the beams of 

 divine truth might diverge in every direction, through 

 native agents supplied from among the converts ; but 

 since he came to the spot he had been obliged to abandon 

 that notion ; not that the Kuruman mission had not been 

 successful, or that the attendance at public worship was 

 small, but simply because the population was meagre, 

 and seemed more likely to become smaller than larger. 

 The field from which native agents might be drawn was 

 thus too small. Farther north there was a denser 

 population. It was therefore his purpose, along with a 

 brother missionary, to make an early journey to the 

 interior, and bury himself among the natives, to learn 

 their language, and slip into their modes of thinking and 

 feeling. He purposed to take with him two of the best 

 qualified native Christians of Kuruman, to plant them as 

 teachers in some promising locality ; and in case any 

 difficulty should arise about their maintenance, he offered, 

 with characteristic generosity, to defray the cost of one 

 of them from his own resources. 



Accordingly, in company with a brother missionary 

 from Kuruman, a journey of seven hundred miles was 

 performed before the end of the year, leading chiefly to 



