From the very first Livingstone saw the importance of the Shiré Valley and Lake Nyassa as the key to Central Africa. Ever since, it has become more and more evident that his surmise was correct. To make the occupation thoroughly effective, he thought much of the desirableness of a British colony, and was prepared to expend a great part of the remainder of his private means to carry it into effect. On August 4th, he says in his Journal: "I have a very strong desire to commence a system of colonization of the honest poor; I would give £2000 or £3000 for the purpose. Intend to write my friend Young about it, and authorize him to draw if the project seems feasible. The Lord remember my desire, sanctify my motives, and purify all my desires. Wrote him. "Colonization from a country such as ours ought to be one of hope, and not of despair. It ought not to be looked upon as the last and worst shift that a family can come to, but the performance of an imperative duty to our blood, our country, our religion, and to humankind. As soon as children begin to be felt an incumbrance, and what was properly in ancient times Old Testament blessings are no longer welcomed, parents ought to provide for removal to parts of this wide world where every accession is an addition of strength, and every member of the household feels in his inmost heart, 'the more the merrier.' It is a monstrous evil that all our healthy, handy, blooming daughters of England have not a fair chance at least to become the centres of domestic affections. The state of society, which precludes so many of them from occupying the position which Englishwomen are so well calculated to adorn, gives rise to enormous evils in the opposite sex,--evils and wrongs which we dare not even name,--and national colonization is almost the only remedy. Englishwomen are, in general, the most beautiful in the world, and yet our national emigration has often, by selecting the female emigrants from workhouses, sent forth the ugliest huzzies in creation to be the mothers--the model mothers--of new empires. Here, as in other cases, State necessities have led to the ill-formed and ill-informed being preferred to the well-formed and well-inclined honest poor, as if the worst as well as better qualities of mankind did not often run in the blood."