explorers, he would have been running backwards and forwards to tell the
news, instead of exploring, and he might have been able to write a
volume upon the discovery of each lake and earn much money thereby."

This was no negative exploration. It was the hard, earnest labor of
years, self-abnegation, enduring patience, and exalted fortitude, such
as ordinary men fail to exhibit. And he had achieved a wonderful deed.
The finding of the poles, north and south, is no greater feat than his.
For, after all, what is it to humanity that the magnetic pole, north or
south, is a few degrees east or west of a certain point in the frozen
seas and barren ice mountains? What can humanity offer as a reward to
those whose bodies lie under cairns of ice save a barren recognition of
their heroism? What have their lives served, beyond that of examples of
heroism and determination? Bronze tablets will record their deeds, but
no races will arise in future years to call them blessed. Cold marble
will enshrine their memory; but there will be no fair commerce, nor
civilization, nor the thankful prayers of those who have been led to
know God.

In his earlier years of exploration, Livingstone became convinced that
the success of the white missionary in a field like Africa is not to be
reckoned by the tale of doubtful conversions he can send home each year,
that the proper work of such men was that of pioneering, opening up,
starting new ground, leaving native agents to work it out in detail. The
whole of his subsequent career was a carrying out of this idea. It was
the idea of commerce, bringing the virgin country within the reach of
the world, putting the natives in that relation to the rest of humanity
which would most nearly make for their efficiency, if not in their own
generation, at least in the next. Shall we not say that this is the
truest ideal of social service--to plan, not for the present, but for
the future; to be content, not with the barren achievement of
exploration, the satisfaction that comes with the saying, "I am the
first who has trod this soil!" but to be able to say, "Through me,
generations may be helped?"

Says a biographer of Dr. Livingstone, "His work in exploration is marked
by rare precision and by a breadth of observation which will make it
forever a monument to the name of one of the most intrepid travellers of
the nineteenth century. His activity embraced the field of the
geographer, naturalist, benefactor of