Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 125.djvu/99

Rh drink is contained in the very last sentence and postscript to his book: — "After my departure from Egypt, Aboo Saood was released and was appointed assistant to my successor."

So ends the story of Baker's attempt to extinguish the slave-trade on the White Nile. We call it an attempt, for it is evident, even from his meeting those seven-hundred slaves on the main stream so low as Fashoda, that it was not successful. So ingrained in fact is slavery in the regions in which Baker conducted his operations that, just as Schweinfurth's Nubians had ventures in slaves, so even the terror of Baker himself could not keep his own troops from engaging in the very traffic which they were sent out to suppress. On one occasion he discovered, that, under his own eyes, the soldiers had purchased no fewer than 126 slaves, while on another he distributed a number of young women whom he had set free, among his men as wives. We cannot help thinking, when we reflect on the ordinary lot of the wives of Egyptian soldiers, that the position of the women thus emancipated must have been merely that of nominal freedom; for it appears, both from the evidence of Schweinfurth and of Baker, that in the seribas of the traders, and in the forts and camps of the Egyptian governors in the Soudan and the regions of the Upper Nile, it is the common practice to allot female slaves to the soldiers in lieu of pay. More than this, with all our admiration for Baker's bravery and for the endurance and skill with which he brought his men out of the perils into which he had led them, we cannot acquit him of Quixotism in undertaking the command of such an expedition. Daily life in Egypt, whether in the bazaars of Cairo or along the silent highway of the Nile, ought to have convinced the merest tourist and tyro in travelling that slavery is an institution of the land which every one acknowledges, the more enlightened perhaps as an evil, but still as a necessity. But that a tried traveller, for a man who had already spent years in those regions of Central Africa where the slave-trade is indigenous, and slaves so common that every other man or woman is a slave, should be so credulous as to suppose that even the khedive would be ready to organize such an expedition for philanthropy alone, quite passes our belief, and, if we are called on to believe it, we can only do so in favour of Baker's heart at the expense of his head. Once committed to such an attempt, its failure was only a matter of time, and for the time at least it has failed. The emancipation of the African tribes who have fallen under the bitter yoke of slavery can only be accomplished by infinite patience and an amelioration of Egyptian morality which presuppose a still more infinite period of time. Certainly the extirpation of this horrible traffic in Central Africa is neither to be accomplished as the visionary Schweinfurth fondly fancies, by the immigration of Chinese, nor by a single expedition or by a series of expeditions however ably commanded. As we close these pages we receive another contribution to the literature of African discovery in the "Last Journals of David Livingstone," to which we regret that we cannot give a more extended notice. They exhibit the same picture of indefatigable energy and endurance on the part of the British traveller, and of barbarism and slavery amongst the natives of Africa; and they derive a peculiar interest from the closing scenes of the life of that great traveller.

 

 From The Cornhill Magazine.

very stars in their courses seemed to fight for this young man.

No sooner had Wenna Rosewarne fled to her own room, there to think over in a wild and bewildered way all that had just happened, than her heart smote her sorely. She had not acted prudently. She had forgotten her self-respect. She ought to have forbidden him to come near her again — at least, until such time as this foolish fancy of his should have passed away and been forgotten,

How could she have parted with him so calmly, and led him to suppose that their former relations were unaltered? She looked back on the forced quietude of her manner, and was herself astonished. Now her heart was beating rapidly; her trembling fingers were unconsciously twisting and untwisting a bit of ribbon; her head seemed giddy with the recollection of that brief and strange interview. Then, somehow, she thought of the look on his face when she told him that henceforth they must be strangers

