“Our kinsmen across the Atlantic deserve our warmest sympathy.  They have passed, and are passing, through trials, and are encompassed with difficulties which completely dwarf those of our Irish famine, and not the least of them is the question, what to do with those freedmen for whose existence as slaves in America our own forefathers have so much to answer.  The introduction of a degraded race from a barbarous country was a gigantic evil, and if the race cannot be elevated, an evil beyond remedy.  Millions can neither be amalgamated nor transported, and the presence of degradation is a contagion which propagates itself among the more civilized.  But I have no fears as to the mental and moral capacity of the Africans for civilization and upward progress.  We who suppose ourselves to have vaulted at one bound to the extreme of civilization, and smack our lips so loudly over our high elevation, may find it difficult to realize the debasement to which slavery has sunk those men, or to appreciate what, in the discipline of the sad school of bondage, is in a state of freedom real and substantial progress.  But I, who have been intimate with Africans who have never been defiled by the slave-trade, believe them to be capable of holding an honorable rank in the family of man.”

Wherever slavery prevailed, or the effects of slavery were found, Dr. Livingstone’s testimony against it was clear and emphatic.  Neither personal friendship nor any other consideration under the sun could repress it.  When his friends Sir Roderick and Mr. Webb afterward expressed their sympathy with Governor Eyre, of Jamaica, he did not scruple to tell them how different an estimate he had formed of the Governor’s conduct.

We continue our extracts from his Journal and letters: 

     24th May.—­Came down to Scotland by last night’s train;
     found mother very poorly; and, being now eighty-two, I fear
     she may not have long to live among us.”

27th May (to Mr. Webb)—­“I have been reading Tom Brown’s School Days—­a capital book.  Dr. Arnold was a man worth his weight in something better than gold.  You know Oswell” [his early friend] “was one of his Rugby boys.  One could see his training in always doing what was brave and true and right.”

“2d June.—­Tom better, but kept back in his education by his complaint.  Oswell getting on well at school at Hamilton.  Anna Mary well.  Mother gradually becoming weaker.  Robert we shall never hear of again in this world, I fear; but the Lord is merciful and just and right in all his ways.  He would hear the cry for mercy in the hospital at Salisbury.  I have lost my part in that gigantic struggle which the Highest guided to a consummation never contemplated by the Southerners when they began; and many other have borne more numerous losses.”

     “5th June.—­Went about a tombstone for my dear Mary.  Got a
     good one of cast-iron to be sent out to the Cape.