854 LIFE OF DA VID LIVINGSTONE, LL.D. 



tribes as at present constituted, the ramifications of the slave trade as at pre- 

 sent carried on, the deep longing on the part of the natives for the presence 

 of the English, and the extreme fear of the Arabs when brought into contact 

 with them, will bear him out in saying that twelve Englishmen on Lake 

 Nyassa, and forty more stationed as Bishop Steere proposes, would in three 

 years make the slave trade a thing of the past, over an enormous tract, and 

 save some hundred thousand lives per annum. 



"Nor, whilst we are on this branch of the subject, can we help speaking 

 freely of the treaties which we have recently made with the Sultan of Zan- 

 zibar, the apprehensions concerning the integrity of territory threatened by 

 the Egyptians, and his supposed powers to interfere with the slave trade 

 throughout his so-called dominions. His ready acquiescence with our sug- 

 gestions for a very good quid pro quo irresistibly recalls the old story of the 

 farmer leaning over the gate by the roadside and allowing the cockney to 

 fire away into the ducks swimming about in the pond on the common at so 

 much a shot. It was only when the slaughterer of ducks found out that he 

 had been putting crown after crown into the hand of a man who had really 

 nothing to do with them that he could properly understand the easy terms 

 agreed upon. 



" So with ourselves: after reading such accounts as Livingstone wrote 

 from Nyangwe, after reading that which Dr. Steere relates on the path to the 

 lake, and Young from the shores of Nyassa itself, to say nothing of the 

 additional testimony of Stanley and Cameron, it is clear that from southern 

 Shire to northern Nile, from the Comoro Islands on the east to the waters of 

 the supposed Congo on the west, the Zanzibar image and superscription is inde- 

 libly stamped on every deed of Arab infamy and bloodshed. It becomes, I say, an 

 anxious question what value we ought to attach to the leave we have obtained 

 from this bland Sultan to interfere in his dominions ; and when we reflect 

 that every musket, every pound of powder, every bale of goods — in short, 

 every Arab caravan which is fitted out for the interior is identified with Zan- 

 zibar to begin with, it is not altogether beside that question to ask also whe- 

 ther we should not now trv our hand in a different direction, and not content 

 ourselves with stopping a mere percentage of the slaves that are exported, 

 after the slave raids organised at Zanzibar have had time to work their bane- 

 ful effect amongst the tribes. 



" In this country the police would far rather break in upon a gang of 

 coiners than detect a poor wretch passing a bad shilling over a counter. In 

 the East our policy is to encourage the coiner, and congratulate ourselves in 

 Parliament and on platforms that we have something to show when we even- 

 tually pick up a bad coin. Mr Young states that twenty thousand slaves 

 were carried across Lake Nyassa last year by Zanzibar Arabs, one of whom 

 had the audacity to appear at the capital a few months after, representing 



