OCR Rendition - approximate

Relations between Civilized and Savage Life. 331 preaching of early Christian missionaries, did much more to civilize and elevate the savage inhabitants of our own island, than has been effected by seventy years of the labour of men like Moffat, Livingstone, Thompson, John Mackenzie, and Hepburn, among the Bechuana tribes. Let any one contrast the accounts given by humane and observant travellers like Burchell, with what may now be seen in the country between the Vaal and the Molappo, or north of that to the northern confines of the Christian king Kama, of Kamangwato, and he will be able' to appreciate the difference. Unfortunately, as in Ancient Britain and everywhere else, so in Bechuanaland, the progress of civilization has inevitably sapped the authority of the barbarian tribal chief, and the absence of any temporal substitute threatens to produce the same anarchical condition which followed the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain. Threatened from the north by the Matabele Zulus, and from the east by the advancing Trek Boers, the Bechuanas, both chiefs and people, have in vain prayed to be taken under the protection of the British Government. The British Government has repeatedly declined to accept the allegiance, and time alone can show whether some chief or adopted foreigner will arise with the genius and energy needed to repel foreign invasion, and to preserve order in the country, or whether the Bechuanas will be subdued, and absorbed or annexed to some other Power, or be driven on to resume the ceaseless slow migrations in front of more powerful tribes pressing on them, which seems to have been their dreary lot for ages before they fell in with the white men advancing northward from the Cape of Good Hope. In the other and less advanced branches of the great Bantu family there is much difference in the civilization of various clans, as they have been more or less under the influence of their European neighbours. In almost every case the impression given by the earliest European observers is that of the extreme savagery of the race as first known to European visitors. Making every allowance for prejudice, and for other circumstances affecting the judgment or competence of observers, it is impossible to read the accounts given by Sir William Harris, Captain Alan Gardiner, Isaacs, and many other competent and by no means unfavourably biassed travellers, without being convinced that the normal state of most of the Bantu tribes who did not belong to the Bechuana family, as apparent to the early European observers, was one of extreme barbarism. It is often stated, but, as far as I know, entirely on the evidence of unsupported oral tradition, that there was a. time not