1 843 -4 7.] FIRST TWO STATIONS. 81 



for whatever the emigrants might say of other tribes, 

 they could not but admit that the Bechuanas had been 

 always an honest and peaceable people. 



When Livingstone met the Dutch commandant he 

 received favourably his proposal of a native missionary, 

 but another obstacle arose. Near the proposed station 

 lived a Dutch emigrant who had shown himself the 

 inveterate enemy of missions. He had not scrupled to 

 say that the proper way to treat any native missionary 

 was to kill him. Livingstone was unwilling to plant 

 Mebalwe beside so bloodthirsty a neighbour, and as he 

 had not time to go to him, and try to bring him to a 

 better mind, and there was plenty of work to be done at 

 the station, they all returned to Chonuane. 



"We have now," says Livingstone (March 1847), 

 " been a little more than a year with the Bakwains. No 

 conversions have taken place, but real progress has been 

 made/' He adverts to the way in which the Sabbath 

 was observed, no work being done by the natives in the 

 gardens on that day, and hunting being suspended. 

 Their superstitious belief in rain-making had got a blow. 

 There was a real desire for knowledge, though hindered 

 by the prevailing famine caused by the want of rain. 

 There was also a general impression among the people 

 that the missionaries were their friends. But civilisation 

 apart from conversion would be but a poor recompence 

 for their labour. 



But, whatever success might attend their work among 

 the Bakwains, Livingstone's soul was soaring beyond 

 them : — 



" I am more and more convinced," he writes to the Directors, " that 

 in order to the permanent settlement of the gospel in any part, the 

 natives must he taught to relinquish their reliance on Europe. An 

 onward movement ought to be made whether men will hear or 

 whether they will forbear. I tell my Bakwains that if spared ten 

 years, I shall move on to regions beyond them. If our missions 

 would move onwards now to those regions I have lately visited, they 



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