FORMS OF GOVERNMENT. 



361 



country Wagosi and Wanyap'hara; they form the coun- 

 cil of the chief. All male children are taken from their 

 mothers, are made to live together, and are trained to 

 the royal service, to guarding the palace, to tilling the 

 fields, and to keeping the watercourses in order. The 

 despot is approached with fear and trembling; subjects 

 of both sexes must stand at a distance, and repeatedly 

 clap their palms together before venturing to address 

 him. Women always bend the right knee to the earth, 

 and the chief acknowledges the salutation with a nod. 

 At times the elders and even the women inquire of the 

 ruler what they can do to please him : he points to a 

 plot of ground which he wishes to be cleared, and this 

 corvee is the more carefully performed, as he fines them 

 in a bullock if a weed be left unplucked. In war female 

 captives are sold by the king, and the children are kept 

 to swell the number of his slaves. None of the Wasoro 

 may marry without express permission. The king has 

 unlimited power of life and death, which he exercises 

 without squeamishness, and a general right of sale over 

 his subjects ; in some tribes, as those of Karagwah, 

 Uganda, and Unyoro, he is almost worshipped. It is a 

 capital offence to assume the name of a Sultan ; even a 

 stranger so doing would be subjected to fines and other 

 penalties. The only limit to the despot's power is the 

 Ada, or precedent, the unwritten law of ancient custom, 

 which is here less mutable than the codes and pandects 

 of Europe. The African, like the Asiatic, is by nature 

 a conservative, at once the cause and the effect of his 

 inability to rise higher in the social scale. The king 

 lives in a manner of barbarous state. He has large 

 villages crowded with his families and slaves. He never 

 issues from his abode without an armed mob, and he 

 disdains to visit even the wealthiest Arabs. The monar- 



