354 DA VID LIVINGSTONE. [chap. xvii. 



are the same that do the most for the mean blacks, and you never 

 hear one mother's son of them say, You do wrong to give to the whites. 

 I told the Committee I had heard people say that Christianity made 

 the blacks worse, but did not agree with them. I might have said it 

 was ' rot,' and truly. I can stand a good deal of bosh, but to tell me 

 that Christianity makes people worse — ugh ! Tell that to the young 

 trouts. You know on what side I am, and I shall stand to my side, Old 

 Pam fashion, through thick and thin. I don't agree with all my side 

 say and do. I won't justify many things, but for the great cause of 

 human progress I am heart and soul, and so are you." 



Dr. Livingstone was asked at this time to attend a 

 public meeting on behalf of American freedmen. It was 

 not in his power to go, but, in apologising, he was at 

 pains to express his opinion on the capacity of the negro, 

 in connection with what was going on in the United 

 States : — 



" Our kinsmen across the Atlantic deserve our warmest sympathy. 

 They have passed, and are passing, through trials, and are encompassed 

 with difficulties which completely dwarf those of our Irish famine, and 

 not the least of them is the question, what to do with those freedmen 

 for whose existence as slaves in America our own forefathers have so 

 much to answer. The introduction of a degraded race from a barbarous 

 country was a gigantic evil, and if the race cannot be elevated, an evil 

 beyond remedy. Millions can neither be amalgamated nor transported, 

 and the presence of degradation is a contagion which propagates itself 

 among the more civilised. But I have no fears as to the mental and 

 moral capacity of the Africans for civilisation and upward progress. 

 We who suppose ourselves to have vaulted at one bound to the extreme 

 of civilisation, and smack our lips so loudly over our high elevation, 

 may find it difficult to realise the debasement to which slavery has 

 sunk those men, or to appreciate what, in the discipline of the sad 

 school of bondage, is in a state of freedom real and substantial progress. 

 But I, who have been intimate with Africans who have never been 

 defiled by the slave-trade, believe them to be capable of holding an 

 honourable rank in the family of man." 



Wherever slavery prevailed, or the effects of slavery 

 were found, Dr. Livingstone's testimony against it was 

 clear and emphatic. Neither personal friendship nor any 

 other consideration under the sun could repress it. When 

 his friends Sir Roderick and Mr. Webb afterwards ex- 

 pressed their sympathy with Governor Eyre of Jamaica, 



