214 LIVINGSTONE'S LAST JOURNALS. [Chap. VIII. 



try to stop an old established usage now?" Well, some 

 believe that the affliction that befel the most ancient of 

 all the patriarchs, Job, was small-pox. Why then stop 

 the ravages of this venerable disease in London and New 

 York by vaccination ? 



But no one expects any benevolent efforts from those who 

 cavil and carp at efforts made by governments and peoples 

 to heal the enormous open sore of the world. Some profess 

 that they would rather give " their mite " for the degraded 

 of our own countrymen than to " niggers " ! Verily it is " a 

 mite," and they most often forget, and make a gift of it to 

 themselves. It is almost an axiom that those who do most 

 for the heathen abroad are most liberal for the heathen at 

 home. It is to this class we turn with hope. With others 

 arguments are useless, and the only answer I care to give is 

 the remark of an English sailor, who, on seeing slave-traders 

 actually at their occupation, said to his companion, " Shiver 

 my timbers, mate, if the devil don't catch these fellows, Ave 

 might as well have no devil at all." 



In conversing with a prince at Johanna, one of the 

 Comoro islands lying off the north end of Madagascar, he 

 took occasion to extol the wisdom of the Arabs in keeping- 

 strict watch over their wives. On suggesting that their 

 extreme jealousy made them more like jailers than friends 

 of their wives, or, indeed, that they thus reduced themselves 

 to the level of the inferior animals, and each was like the 

 bull of a herd and not like a reasonable man — "fuguswa " — 

 and that they gave themselves a vast deal of trouble for very 

 small profit ; he asserted that the jealousy was reasonable 

 because all women were bad, they could not avoid going 

 astray. And on remarking that this might be the case 

 with Arab women, but certainly did not apply to English 

 women, for though a number were untrustworthy, the 

 majority deserved all the confidence their husbands could 

 place in them, he reiterated that women were universally 



