His rule was despotic in the extreme; its barbarities were unparalleled.  His warriors were rewarded by slaves and plunder, and their warlike expeditions have been incessant to the last.  Bursting upon the Bahurutse tribes beyond the Zulu territory, myriads of lives were flung away.  The tribes were crushed, destroyed, and scattered.  The remnant fell upon their neighbours; or fled into the desert; or escaped, like the Makololo, to a new land.  For twenty years the country was a sea of war, in which Mantatees and Bergenaars, Barolongs and Bangwaketse, Bakwains and Matebele, were flung upon one another, until the storm spent itself, and but a remnant was left.  Often did the Matebele themselves suffer terribly.  Often did the stratagems of Scythians and Libyans in ancient days reappear in this modern warfare.  The refugees decoyed their terrible enemies into the desert, and left them to die miserably of thirst.  Driven to the northward by fear of Dingaan, in the Makololo and their brave chief, Sebituane, the Matebele found their match.  But on the weaker tribes, to the banks of the Zambesi, they have waged incessant and successful war.

What a mighty need is there of the Gospel here!  In no field of the Society’s efforts is that need so strikingly manifest.  The incessant wars, the shocking inhumanity, the indescribable vices, the universal degradation, all attest the depth of sin and misery in which millions of our race pass their lives.  Acuteness, bravery, manliness are not wanting; right and wrong are not unacknowledged; the future world is not unknown.  Even tenderness is not unfelt; the sorrows of children could touch Moselekatse’s heart to its very core.  But how appalling their ignorance, their misery, their sin!  Is it true that they are responsible—­that “they are without excuse”?  Is it true that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men”; that “neither thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God”; that “the fearful, the abominable, murderers, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the second death”?  How loud the call upon us to save them; to waken them from their sleep of evil, and proclaim with tenderness and power, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”!  For all this wrong and all this misery the Gospel is a perfect remedy, and we have only to apply it fully.  To enlighten these degraded souls by knowledge; to humanize their hardness; to save women and children; to deliver all from sin; to bring them upward to the Father whom they have forgotten, by opening to them His divine compassion in the Lord Jesus; to make life worth living for, because it is the portal of a heavenly life for ever:  this has been the purpose and this the work of our faithful brethren for fifty years.  Other men have gone there with very different aims.  When once the missionary had made it safe, the trader