Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/578

566 sending the king's "commands for the immediate expulsion of Mr. Locke." Fell's reply was as follows: —
 * "Right honourable, — I hold myself bound to signify to your lordship that his Majesty's command for the expulsion of Mr. Locke from this college is fully executed."

The deprivation of Locke is excused by Lord Grenville on the ground that it was the act, not of the dean and chapter, but of the crown, and that the college authorities merely registered a mandate which they were bound to obey. But the dean and chapter did more than register it; they, to use their own words, "put it in execution." If they had not executed it, there would have been great difficulty in enforcing it. Nor can the legality of the mandate have been clear even to them. At least, four years later, when the fellows of Magdalen were expelled by the prerogative of the crown, exercised by commission, after the parties were heard, which Locke was not, no doubt was entertained in the university of the illegality of the proceeding. Yet the Magdalen College case was conducted with some show of the forms of justice, which were not attempted to be preserved in the case of a Whig and a friend of Shaftesbury.

 

 From The Spectator.

are not half as much interested in Northern Africa as in Central Africa, and it is rather stupid of them. No book about Morocco, or Algeria, or Tunis, or even Timbuctoo, will sell like a book about Lake Nyanza, even though the former is written by an artist, and the latter by one who has as little idea how to make a book as poor Dr. Livingstone. No lecture on the Niger attracts an audience like one on the Upper Nile, and men who know all about Dr. Livingstone's friends and Sir S. Baker's enemies and the khedive's new tributaries, hardly know the names of the States which claim the southern border of the Mediterranean, and do not know at all the limit of tneir southern boundaries. This neglect is a mistake, for even if a negro is more interesting than an Arab Moor, which he is not, the Moor having perhaps of all semi-savage men the largest undeveloped potentiality of genius, and having displayed his power already as conqueror, architect, and scientific inquirer, and if tropical Africa is less known than the northern region — which is now not the case — North Africa has one advantage which ought to make its geography a permanent object of enlightened curiosity. Every foot gained in Northern Africa is a foot gained for Europe, a foot of room for the development of the races to which, so far as man can perceive, the civilization of mankind has been entrusted. The Nyanza is far off, but Timbuctoo is near. Livingstone may have been clearing the way for the English ultimately, but he has cleared it immediately for the Egyptian Turks. North Africa has once been European, and if Europe could but once be convinced that it is worth having, would be European again. The emperor Napoleon, whose dreaminess was his strong as well as his weak point, dreamed and said that it was worth having; and he may have been right, though Europe, alarmed by the desert, by Mohammedan fanaticism, and by the failure of the French, who are not colonists, to colonize Algeria, declines without further evidence to believe it. Europe may be justified by the event, but a region practically limitless, which was once a granary, which may contain mineral resources of immense extent, and which is everywhere within six days' steam of Marseilles, is worth a greal deal more effort at exploration than has yet been bestowed upon it. The exploration of Northern Africa, with an especial view to its fertility, its mineral treasures, and its capacity for sustaining Europeans — a capacity probably exceeding that of Spain — should be undertaken systematically; and if the southern nations, to whom the task properly falls, are unequal to the task, Englishmen should commence it for them. They have the men, the energy, and the money, and may well expend a moderate quantity of all three in an effort to know the one grand region which European energy has once attacked, has begun to conquer, and then has abandoned to the semi-savage and the sand.

They could hardly make a better beginning — though it seems to be an indirect one — than by supporting the Mackenzie Mission, brought before a public meeting at the Mansion House on Monday, but apparently received with more of astonishment than of the enthusiasm which yields money. The project then unfolded seems a dreamy one, but its dreaminess may be exaggerated; and