Still, who is to be “king,” or “chief,” or “Jaga,” or “Mambo,” or whatever else you please, as representing the stock or common centre of the said wheel? About this question, however, we need not trouble ourselves, and simply because, just as the queen bee is born in a hive, so are men born commanders of men; that is, originally; the fact of their descendants degenerating, and being totally unfit to wield a sceptre is nothing to the purpose. Custom and Fashion then step in, and these two of themselves are monarchs potent enough to settle the gravest question that could possibly arise, even in the most civilized countries in the world. Wherever a leader is wanted, a leader will be found; he may be a wrong-headed leader, or conceited, or cruel, or arbitrary; but so sure as he remains at the helm, for the short space only of a year, you may depend that he is no make-believe; and the very worst you can say of such an one is, that it is a pity that a king should possess so many bad qualities; that he deserves to die for them, if you please; nay, go as far as killing him, and how different are your feelings than though you had killed a merely contemptible upstart. Of course I talk of “killing” as a figure of speech, in its extremest sense. There, however, is one king now existing whom, if with his life would end the hideous work of blood and carnage prevailing in his nation, might well be wished dead. I allude to the King of Dahomey, who, as a trafficker in human beings, dead and alive, is an ulcer on the face of the world; a man whose guilt is so black that it may never be washed away, though they laved him in rivers of water as deep as those of tears and blood that he has caused to flow. We hear very little of this potentate. Now and then an adventurous European will penetrate his awful domains, and give to the world some account of the horrors he sees and hears; once in a while we read in the African News that “the King of Dahomey threatens a massacre on such or such a place,” or that the barbarous “annual custom” is about to commence, with an enumeration of the victims already secured, and whose blood is required to “water the late king’s grave.” Of all Englishmen who have witnessed the abominations of Dahomey, none have recorded them more graphically than Commander Forbes, and it is from his account chiefly that what is here related of Dahomey is derived.