arguing, says the witty author, so deep a devotion to that art which hath power to soothe the savage breast. With time and tune well developed, but wholly wanting in initiative, the wild men easily learned music from the missionaries; yet they have always preferred their own meaningless declamation. Of course the Kinyika is an illiterate language. The policy of the Wanyika is a rude and lawless liberty, equality, fraternity. None commands where none obeys: consequently there is no ‘temperamentum of chief,’ no combination, and no possible improvement. The headman plies his hoe, like the serf, in his little plot of maize or manioc; and the clans will not unite even to protect life. Causes are decided by a council of elders, according to the great African code—ancient custom. The chief of the five Shaykhs is he of Rabai Mku; but even he dare not arrogate to himself any authority. Pilfering is common, robbing is rare; and a man caught in the act of stealing is chastised by the proprietor with sword or bow. Adultery is punished by the fine of a cow and abundance of liquor. The murderer is more often mulcted than handed over for death to the family of the slain; and little is said concerning the slaughter of a slave. Divided into half-a-dozen sub-tribes, each barely sufficient to stock an English village, these savages find petty political jealousies and intrigues as necessary and as ready to hand as do the highly civilized. The Wanyika readily attended the European schools as long as these were a novelty; presently, with the characteristic African levity and inconsequence, they grew weary of application, and they dubbed all who so exerted themselves Wazingu, or fools. Yet in one point they are an anomaly. They possess, in a high degree, the gift of many negro and negroid races, an unstudied eloquence which the civilized speaker might envy, and which, like poetry, seems to flourish most in the dawn of civilization. To see, says a Brazilian author, men so eloquent and so badly governed does not suggest that public speaking in the virility of civilization is a great ruling power. Their unpremeditated speech rolls like a torrent; every limb takes its part in the great work of persuasion, and the peculiar rhythm of their copious dialect, favourable to such displays of oratory, forms an effective combination. Few, however, can ‘follow the words,’ that is to say, answer in due order the heads of an opponent’s speech. Such power of memory and logical faculty is not in them. The abuse of the gift of language makes them boisterous in conversation, unable to keep silence—the negro race is ever loquacious—and addicted to ‘bending their tongues like their bows for lies.’ They cannot even, to use a Zanzibar German merchant’s phrase, ‘lie honestly.’ Their character may thus be briefly summed up: a futile race of barbarians, drunken and immoral; cowardly and destructive; boisterous and loquacious; indolent, greedy, and thriftless. Their