There is no one living or dead who has so profoundly influenced the condition of Eastern Africa as Sir John Kirk. To him more than to any one else is owing the effective repression of slave-trading; and it is only quite recently that the full consequences of his steady anti-slavery policy began to appear and develop themselves into a healthy and beneficent solution of a difficult African problem. When Sir John first arrived in Zanzibar the Arab ruler of the island, the so-called Sultan, was little more than _primus inter pares_. He was recognized as “Sayyid,” or Lord, of Zanzibar, by the Arab nobles and traders, but his authority was most uncertain. Many of his subjects thought themselves superior to him in purity of blood and ancient genealogy, and whenever the wishes of their nominal ruler—merely one of themselves deputed to transact the Government business—clashed with their personal interests or predilections, they openly bade him defiance, and put their fortress-houses into a state of siege. The standing army was composed of a few miserable, beggarly Baluch mercenaries—ill-clothed, unpaid, and as cowardly as they were rapacious. Slaves were openly sold in Zanzibar, and the Sayyid was too weak to incur the displeasure of his Arab subjects by the suppression of a lucrative and easy trade. When Sayyid Majid died and the present “Sultan,” Barghash bin Sa’id, succeeded him, Sir John Kirk set himself resolutely to acquire the confidence and friendship of the young Arab ruler, and, aided by his great knowledge of Arabic and Ki-Swahili, was able to converse with the Sayyid in strict intimacy, without the medium of an interpreter, so that he was enabled often to weld the will of Barghash to conformity with his own wishes by means of an earnest expostulation and half-playful sarcasm which would have sounded ill through the intermediary of some wily Goanese. So great was the influence already exercised over the Prince of Zanzibar after two years of personal intercourse that Sir John Kirk was able to exact from him as a favour and concession to friendship that which Sir Bartle Frere, with all his personal prestige and position, and with a fleet of ironclads behind him, failed to extort, namely, the Sayyid’s signature to a treaty for the suppression of the East African slave-trade. This, though refused under threats of bombardment, was granted after a few hours’ conversation with Sir John Kirk, and the treaty, which during Sir Bartle Frere’s mission had been persistently rejected by the “Sultan,” was signed and sealed within a few hours after the envoy’s departure, and overtook him in a rapid despatch-boat before he reached Aden. An amusing incident is recorded of Sayyid Barghash during the _séance_ of deliberation which took place before he signed the treaty. Sir John Kirk was explaining to him the terrors and inconveniences of a blockade, how all supplies of provisions would be stopped, and the island reduced to