In justice to the General it must be told that when he did find out his mistakes, and how grossly he had been imposed upon, he was man enough and gentleman enough to own his errors--though not in public. That could hardly be expected. He admitted that he had ‘wronged the Hovas and misjudged the London Missionary Society’s missionaries,’ and reversed his policy with regard to both. It ought also to be told that he did his best to atone for the grave error into which he was led with regard to the Governor of Tàmatàve, by his treatment of the family, especially of the eldest son. The guilt of that ‘judicial murder,’ as a French gentleman called it, must be laid mainly at the doors of the ‘good governor’s’ malignant enemies. As he once admitted, the General went to Madagascar with the intention of stamping out Protestantism and making the people Roman Catholics, as the simplest way with the religious difficulty, and the easiest way of ruling the island, as he thought. From what he had seen of the so-called religion of the natives of the Soudan, and from what he had been told--that the people would be quite ready to change their religion, if he expressed a wish for it--he thought the matter would be very easily managed. He found that the religion of the Malagasy was of a very different kind from what he had met with in Africa. Their Protestantism was made of sterner stuff than he had imagined. The people, whose forefathers had died rather than renounce their faith at the bidding of their own sovereign, were not likely to renounce it now at the word of a European governor-general. Had he persisted in his course, a religious war would have been the result. Four-fifths of the people of the central provinces are Protestant. General Gallieni and the French government came to see this, and wisely left the religion of the people severely alone. Religious liberty, which had been proclaimed before, became now more of a reality. The Radical government of M. Brisson, to their honour be it told, the day after they entered into power, ordered their colonial secretary to telegraph to Madagascar that the forty village churches which had been seized by the Jesuits in the Bètsilèo country were to be restored at once. This order had to be obeyed, and was a great blow to the arrogance and assumption of the Jesuits. [Illustration: GENERAL GALLIENI.]