i2 4 DAVID LIVINGSTONE. [chap. vi. 



by expenses in Cape Town. He had been as economical 

 as possible ; in personal expenditure most careful — he had 

 been a teetotaler for twenty years. He did not hesitate 

 to express his conviction that the salary was inadequate, 

 and to urge the Directors to defray the extra expenditure 

 which was now inevitable ; but with characteristic 

 generosity, he urged Mr. Moffat's claims much more 

 warmly than his own. 



From expressions in Livingstone's letter to the 

 Directors, it is evident that he was fully aware of the 

 risk he ran, in his new line of work, of appearing to sink 

 the missionary in the explorer. There is no doubt that 

 next to the charge of forgetting the claims of his family, 

 to which we have already adverted, this was the most 

 plausible of the objections taken to his subsequent career. 

 But any one who has candidly followed his course of 

 thought and feeling from the moment when the sense of 

 unseen realities burst on him at Blantyre, to the time 

 at which we have now arrived, must see that this view is 

 altogether destitute of support. The impulse of divine 

 love that had urged him first to become a missionary 

 had now become with him the settled habit of his life. 

 No new ambition had flitted across his path, for though 

 he had become known as a geographical discoverer, he 

 says he thought very little of the fact, and his life shows 

 this to have been true. Twelve years of missionary life 

 had given birth to no sense of weariness, no abatement 

 of interest in these poor black savages, no reluctance to 

 make common cause with them in the affairs of life, no 

 despair of being able to do them good. On the contrary, 

 he was confirmed in his opinion of the efficacy of his 

 favourite plan of native agency, and if he could but get a 

 suitable base of operations, he was eager to set it going, 

 and on every side he was assured of native welcome. 

 Shortly before (5th February 1850), when writing to his 

 father with reference to a proposal of his brother Charles 



