ty children. They heard of another tribe, said to excel all others
in manufacturing skill, and having the honorable distinction, "they had
never been known to kill any one." This lily among thorns they were
unable to visit. Three tribes of Bakhalaka whom they did visit were at
continual war.

[Footnote 25: He wrote to his father that he would have called him Neil,
if it had not been such an ugly name, and all the people would have
called him Ra-Neeley!]

Deriving his information from the Boers themselves, Livingstone learned
that they had taken possession of nearly all the fountains, so that the
natives lived in the country only by sufferance. The chiefs were
compelled to furnish the emigrants with as much free labor as they
required. This was in return for the privilege of living in the country
of the Boers! The absence of law left the natives open to innumerable
wrongs which the better-disposed of the emigrants lamented, but could
not prevent. Livingstone found that the forcible seizure of cattle was a
common occurrence, but another custom was even worse. When at war, the
Dutch forced natives to assist them, and sent them before them into
battle, to encounter the battle-axes of their opponents, while the Dutch
fired in safety at their enemies over the heads of their native allies.
Of course all the disasters of the war fell on the natives; the Dutch
had only the glory and the spoil. Such treatment of the natives burned
into the very soul of Livingstone. He was specially distressed at the
purpose expressed to pick a quarrel with Sechele, for whatever the
emigrants might say of other tribes, they could not but admit that the
Bechuanas had been always an honest and peaceable people.

When Livingstone met the Dutch commandant he received favorably his
proposal of a native missionary, but another obstacle arose. Near the
proposed station lived a Dutch emigrant who had shown himself the
inveterate enemy of missions. He had not scrupled to say that the proper
way to treat any native missionary was to kill him. Livingstone was
unwilling to plant Mebalwe beside so bloodthirsty a
neighbor**(spelling?), and as he had not time to, go to him, and try to
bring him to a better mind, and there was plenty of work to be done at
the station, they all returned to Chonuane.

"We have now," says Livingstone (March, 1847), "been a little more than
a year with the Bakwains. No conversions have taken place, but real
progress has been made