From The Pall Mall Gazette. THE CONQUEST OF THE NILE BASIN. THERE is something singularly attractive, and yet provocative of melancholy thought, in the description which travellers give us of the first aspect of regions absolutely new to the explorer-the exuberant beauties of nature as yet untouched by man, or only touched by men too weak and too few to spoil them. Such is the picture drawn by Dr. Livingstone in a few striking words of the shores of that solitary lake which he reached several degrees south of Nyanza, and which he believes to receive and discharge again the waters of the infant Nile.

On the 2nd of April, 1867, I discovered Lake Liemba; it lies in a hollow, with precipitous sides 2,000 feet down; it is extremely beautiful, sides, top, and bottom being covered with trees and other vegetation. Elephants, buffaloes, and antelopes, feed on the steep slopes, while hippopotami, crocodiles, and fish swarm in the waters. Guns being unknown, the elephants, unless sometimes deceived into a pitfall, have it all their own way. It is as perfect a natural paradise as Xenophon could have desired. On two rocky islands, men till the land, rear goats, and catch fish; the villagers ashore are embowered in the palm-oil palms of the West Coast of Africa. Four considerable streams flow into Liemba, and a number of brooks, Scottice troutburns, leap down the steep bright red clay schist rocks, and form splendid cascades, that made the dullest of my attendants pause and

remark with wonder.

Africa for the benefit of the Khedive, people
in general were at all aware of the real
scope of the expedition which was an-
nounced with such a flourish of philanthropic
trumpets. The object declared in this coun-
try was that of putting down the internal
slave trade- that slave trade of which the
Nile is the channel of communication, and
which now supplies Egypt and the Levant
generally with an annual tribute of victims.
This was to be effected by a kind of home-
opathic treatment, using Egyptians, trained
soldiers of the Pasha, to disconcert the
schemes and break up the establishments
of their brother Egyptians, the slave deal-
ers. So far so good, and Exeter Hall was
doubtless charmed to hear of an Oriental
potentate so liberal minded, and an English
traveller so high spirited and adventurous,.
combining their energies to effect so praise-
worthy an object. But it now turns out
that there was a far different purpose -or
rather two widely different purposes
the bottom of the scheme. This is bow Sir
Samuel Baker himself describes it in a "pri-
vate" letter of so recent a date as the 22nd
of last month, which has made its way into
the newspapers:

at

crushing the slave trade-1. To annex to The main objects of our enterprise are, after Egypt the equatorial Nile Basin. 2. To establish a powerful government throughout all the tribes now warring with each other. 3. To introduce the cultivation of cotton on an extensive scale, so that the natives will have a valuSuch is Liemba now: what will it be a able production to exchange for Manchester few years hence, when the road which Liv- goods, &c. 4. To open to navigation the two ingstone has pioneered has been made plain great lakes of the Nile. 5. To establish a chain to the inroads of our restless white race? be annexed, so as to communicate with the of trading stations throughout the countries to The noble animals now swarming in that northern base from the most distant point magnificent preserve will have been exter-south, on the system adopted by the Hudson's minated; they will have fallen victims, not Company. to the necessities of hunger or the purposes of trade, but to what we call the instincts of the sportsman." Their unused carcases will cumber the earth, their size and numbers will be registered in the game-books of future Gordon Cummings. As for the natives, now leading an idyllic life in their "palm-embowered villages," it is not so easy to predict their destiny. The worst that can befall them is short and sharp extinction at the hands of some more powerful race. "Annexation" to the dominion of Egypt, under the auspices of Sir Samuel Baker and his steam-conveyed army The flotilla (sent up the Nile two months ago, black conquerors is the alternative now pro-racts) comprises six steamers of 40-horse power which I hear has successfully ascended the cataposed, and it is one not to be contemplated with mere philosophical indifference.

of

We very much doubt whether, when this distinguished explorer started with his present roving commission to subdue Central

Every tribe will be compelled to cultivate a certain amount of corn and cotton in proportion to the population. No wars will be permitted. Each chief will be held responsible for the acts of his tribe. Tribute will be exacted in iabour to be performed in opening out roads on the same principle as the road tax in Ceylon. To carry out these plans I have absolute power conferred by the Viceroy.

It appears that his force, 1,700 Egyptian soldiers, with twelve months' supplies, has already reached Khartoum.

each, and thirty large sailing vessels.

I received from the Viceroy, together with absolute power, carte blanche for all the expenses of the expedition. I have the greatest hopes of effecting a vast improvement among

manufactures.

We have, therefore, lent the prestige of our name, and an amount of mechanical assistance (though paid for), which will infallibly induce all other nations to set down the undertaking as one of our own, veiled only under pretexts too common to impose on any one, in order to annex to Egypt the equatorial Nile Basin." To be annexed to Egypt may or may not be a blessing, according as Egypt may behave to its new provinces; but in order to be annexed, these countries must first be conquered; does any one realize the meaning of the conquest" of feeble ill-armed negro tribes by a half-civilized army? When conquered and annexed, "tribute will be exacted from them in labour to be performed in opening out roads." Would any one like to know the real character of Egyptian road labour? Here it is, as described in a recent letter by a correspondent of the Daily News:

66

the tribes by the suppression of the slave trade, | " compelled to cultivate a certain quantity and by the introduction of agricultural and of corn and cotton." "If" Sir Samuel succommercial enterprise. I have large quanti- ceeds in freeing the tribes from slavery, he ties of seeds of all kinds that will be adapted to will then "insist on their working for themthe climate and soil of Central Africa, and these selves." Has any ingenious person yet solved will confer a great blessing on the country. If the problem how uncivilized men, or any I free the tribes from slavery I shall insist upon men, are to be "compelled to cultivate " by their working for themselves; they will then desire to change their surplus produce for our any method except the venerable one of slavery? and is Sir Samuel Baker imitating the exquisite delicacy of language with which the framers of the American Constitution avoided the term "slavery" altogether, and spoke of "persons held to service?" We have no quarrel with Sir Samuel Baker. We admire his quiet courage, his fund of "resource," his insight into the ways of savage men, and power of awing and commanding them, and we do not doubt the genuineness of the desire which he feels to put down that internal slave trade of which he has witnessed the demoralizing effects. And the sovereign, or quasi-sovereign, who has just inaugurated the opening of the Suez Canal, has shown abundantly his power to appreciate, and to aid in, the great work of civilization. But the most powerful sovereigns and the most energetic commanders can only work through their agents. To suppose that, with no other instruments but Egyptian soldiers and officers, Sir Samuel Baker can annex a large slice of a continent and make its inhabitants grow cotton without an amount of violence and bloodshed which no theoretical goodness of purpose confidance which we are far from possessing. can possibly justify, requires an extreme of But, besides all this, the final end-the raison d'etre of the expedition, as far as injured road is level with the rest. The beating we its English abettors are concerned, is was not severe, but it never ceased. The stick only too plainly expressed. The newlysometimes fell on the empty basket on the back, conquered Egyptians are to be compelled and often on the loose folds of the skirt, and so to grow cotton." Supply is wanted for loosely as not to hurt, but it was used regu- the Lancashire market. It is the old story larly, and seemed, indeed, an integral item in under a new disguise. Our manufacturers the discipline. It was all free labour. Those (or, we are happy to believe, a section of engaged on it are paid; but the taskmasters or them only) cannot be brought to wait for gangers had a certain duty to perform, and the fair expansion of free trade, the develthey went through it so unflinchingly that the opment of free industry. Men must be forced to work for them, under one mitigating phrase or another, all the world over. there is certainly a taste of Liverpool about the scheme; a strong flavour of the "Southern Association."

There are five or six hundred people scooping out mud and earth with their hands, filling baskets and carrying them on their heads then large canvas sacks are filled and planted as a foundation by naked men who stand up to their middle in water. Then another file of men and children step up and empty more baskets in the strata of sacks, and so on till the

tears and lamentations never ceased.

This is the case in the neighborhood of Cairo. What will it be in that of Gondokoro? But this is only the beginning of tribulations. In the next place, they are to be

66

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From The Quarterly Review.
ISAAC BARROW.*

came,

and his brother Isaac, a divine of good repute, became after the Restoration Bishop THE once well known 66 'Encyclopédie of St. Asaph's. The younger and more faMéthodique" speaks of Barrow as an ob- mous Isaac was born in London in 1630. scure theologian, who was better known as At Charterhouse, whither he appears to a mathematician; most Englishmen would have been sent at an early age, the vigour probably describe him as a standard divine of the healthy and restless boy displayed of the seventeenth century, altogether ig- itself rather in playing and fighting than in noring his scientific attainments. Either of attention to his books; but at Felsted these estimates singly is inadequate, but School,* to which he was transferred, either the Frenchman's is nearly that of Barrow's changed by more judicious treatment, or own time, the Englishman's that of posterity; prematurely sobered by the growing troubles for Barrow's theological fame is to a great of the times, which were deeply felt in the extent posthumous, while his repute as a loyal household of Thomas Barrow, he bemathematician was contemporary. His serwhat he ever afterwards continued to mons, which appeal to the great unchang- be, industrious and conscientious. While ing principles of human nature, have an un- he was at Felsted, his name was placed on dying interest; his mathematical works the boards of Peter-house, his uncle's colhave fallen out of the knowledge of a gen-lege; but when he actually came into resieration which has learned to work by more dence, in February, 1645, he migrated to perfect methods. But whatever his present fame, Barrow was in fact in the front rank of the scholars, mathematicians, and divines of his time; no other Englishman represents so completely the culture, especially the Cambridge culture, of a very interesting period, the period of the great transformation both of academic and ecclesiastical thought which took place in the middle of the seventeenth century. His boyhood was passed under the primacy of Laud; in his mature age he enjoyed the friendship of Tillotson. When he entered Cambridge the study of mathematics there had scarcely advanced beyond Euclid and Apollonius; when he died, Isaac Newton, his own pupil, was mathematical professor. The life of such a man is well worth examining, both for its own interest and for the light which it throws upon the age.

Isaac Barrow was son of Mr. Thomas Barrow, a respectable citizen of London, linen-draper to Charles I.; a man probably of the same class socially as the greatest of city linen-drapers, Isaac Walton, himself brother-in-law of a bishop. Thomas Barrow's father was a Cambridgeshire justice,

Trinity College, of which another Isaac Barrow, his father's great-uncle, had been a fellow and a benefactor in the previous century. His father, who followed the court to Oxford, had by this time fallen into low estate, and young Isaac was indebted for his support, in the early part of his University course, mainly to the excellent Dr. Henry Hammond, who procured contributions from his friends for the maintenance of promising students, as a seed-plot for the future ministry of the Church of England.†

It does not appear that Barrow, like some of his contemporaries who came from the north, had to journey to his university through bye-ways to avoid the “ rapparees" who infested the high-roads, but he found at Cambridge signs enough of a time out of joint. The civil war was approaching its crisis; the negotiations between the contending parties at Uxbridge were broken off in the very month he reached Trinity; the decisive battle of Naseby was fought in June of the same year; and, a circumstance which more nearly concerned him, the Earl of Manchester, with the authority of Parliament, had in the previous year set about " regulating and reforming " the University of Cambridge. During the

* The Theological Works of Isaac Barrow, D. D.,
Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 9 vols.
Edited for the Syndics of the University Press by
the Rev. Alexander Napier, M.A., Trinity College,
Cambridge, Vicar of Holkham, Norfolk. With a
Notice of Barrow's Life and Academical Times, by
W. Whewell, D. D., Master of Trinity College,
Cambridge. Cambridge, at the University Press. 343. (3rd ed.)

*Then a famous school, having, when Wallis the mathematician was there (1630), a hundred or sixscore boys. Walis, in Hearne's Langtoft, I. cxlv, (Ed. London, 1810.)

↑ Wordsworth's "Ecclesiastical Biography," iv.,