AN ARAB PRINCE'S OPINION OF WOMEN. 527 



The letters received from Dr. Livingstone, and published up to the 

 time of his death, were all written in a cheerful spirit. As yet, no letter 

 written after the shadow of death had begun to fall upon him has been given 

 to the public. The most interesting letter is that addressed to Mr. G-ordon 

 Bennett, giving as it does so graphic an account of the daily life of a Central 

 African family ; we reproduce the bulk of it : — 



" I feel that a portion at least of the sympathy in England for what sim- 

 ple folks called the ' Southern cause,' during the American civil war, was a 

 lurking liking to be slaveholders themselves. One Englishman at least tried 

 to put his theory of getting the inferior race to work for nothing into practice. 

 He was brother to a member of Parliament for a large and rich constituency, 

 and when his mother died she left him £2000. With this he bought a wag- 

 gon and oxen at the Cape of Good Hope, and an outfit composed chiefly of 

 papier mache snuff-boxes, each of which had a looking-glass outside and ano- 

 ther inside the lid. These, he concluded, were the i sinews of war.' He 

 made his way to my mission-station, more than a thousand miles inland, and 

 then he found that his snuff-boxes would not even buy food. On asking the 

 reason for investing in that trash, he replied that, in reading a book of tra- 

 vels, he saw that the natives were fond of peering into looking-glasses, and 

 liked snuff, and he thought that he might obtain ivory in abundance for these 

 luxuries. I gathered from his conversation that he had even speculated on 

 being made a chief. He said that he knew a young man who had so specu- 

 lated ; and I took it to be himself. We supported him for about a couple of 

 months, but our stores were fast drawing to a close. We were then recently 

 married, and the young housekeeper could not bear to appear inhospitable to 

 a fellow-countryman. I relieved her by feeling an inward call to visit ano- 

 ther tribe. ' Oh,' said our dependant, ' I shall go too.' ' You had better not,' 

 was the reply, and no reason assigned. He civilly left some scores of his 

 snuff-boxes, but I could never use them either. He frequently reiterated, 

 ' People think these blacks stupid and ignorant; but, by George, they would 

 sell any Englishman.' 



" I may now give an idea of the state of supreme bliss, for the attain- 

 ment of which all the atrocities of the so-called Arabs are committed in Cen- 

 tral Africa. In conversing with a half-caste Arab prince, he advanced the 

 opinion, which I believe is general among them, that all women were utterly 

 and irretrievably bad. I admitted that some were no better than they should 

 be, but the majority were unmistakably good and trustworthy. He insisted 

 that the reason why we English allowed our wives so much liberty, was 

 because we did not know them as Arabs did. 'No, no,' he added, 'no 

 woman can be good — no Arab woman — no English woman can be good; all 

 must be bad;' and then he praised his own and countrymen's wisdom and 

 cunning in keeping their wives from ever seeing other men. A rough joke 



