Scotland/Scots > Last years of Livingstone

THE LAST YEARS OF LIVINGSTONE.
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every sea,—all the work of Christians, and all combining
to make the world one. The descendants of the Galileans
are breaking down national prejudices faster than St.
Francis Xavier, or the most devoted professional mission¬
aries. The influences brought to bear by one nation on
another, though sometimes for evil, are mainly for good.
The freedom of the slaves of the United States must tell
towards the deliverance of 3,000,000 of bondsmen in Bra¬
zil, and something must result of good to this trodden-
down, scattered, and peeled Africa, so that it shall not
always remain the waste place of the world.
I look towards benevolent statesmen and the public
press as more likely to stop this East Coast slave trade
than any other agency. Statesmen have for many
years appeared to me as missionaries of the first water.
Formerly I took them to be what some still consider
them, as anxious only for place and power; gentlemen,
perhaps, but not over scrupulous as to the means em¬
ployed to gain their own selfish ends. I forbear mention¬
ing the names of the living, but circumstances led to
a more accurate knowledge of several—the good Lord Pal¬
merston, for instance, who gave me a widely different im¬
pression. For fourteen years he laboured unweariedly at
what was really doing good on a large scale—the suppres¬
sion of the slave trade on the West Coast of Africa. This
climate has deprived me completely of all taste for politics ;
so I think I can give an unbiased opinion that the great
English statesmen, of my time at least, have followed as
their chief aim the doing good on a large scale. Their un-