Slaves were still coming to the station in great numbers, but I did all that I could to discourage their arrival. We had now learned that they were by no means paragons of virtue. After they settled, it was difficult to keep them in order. They quarrelled both with the freemen about us, and with each other. Most of them resided in the village of Kumlomba, a Blantyre headman, and he was expected to govern them, but he had the greatest difficulty in doing so. More refugees could not safely be received unless the Mission Directors appointed some layman to take charge of them. Such government might have been a blessing to the poor slaves, but as matters stood, the Mission ran the risk of collecting around it a number of people each of whom would do “what was right in his own eyes”. The reception of slaves no doubt had certain advantages. Already nearly 400 had gathered about the station, and a great number of these had sought an asylum in order to escape death. The Mission had thus saved a great many lives, but at a terrible risk. Its course of action had made enemies of all the slave-owners in the district, and even tended to increase the slave-trade, for when a master saw that his slaves might run to the English, he resolved to sell them off as soon as possible. Again, the reception of persons who had fled to escape death or any of the other hard consequences of slavery, soon led anyone that fancied he had a grievance, to desert his master and seek refuge at the Mission, while the kindly treatment he experienced made him desirous of having his friends or relatives with him to share his advantages. Thus the settlement was in danger of becoming a large state, composed of all the discontented people of the country. Livingstone attributes the failure of the old Portuguese Missions, to the fact that they made little or no resistance to slavery, and the difficulty is greater than might at first sight appear. When a missionary stands by and sees the evils of slavery without actively interfering, the sympathy that he expresses for the slave, or the protests that he utters, are regarded as insincere by the natives: while the moment that he goes beyond moral methods, he steps out of his proper sphere. It must ever be a dangerous experiment to set hundreds of slaves free, and leave them to live without any of the terrible restraints that their owners find necessary.