The Press. — London, England, 1856-12-20 00:00:00

DECEMBER 20, 1856. The PRESIDENT asked what articles of commerce not hitherto known to British merchants were likely to be opened up to the British trader? Dr. LIVINGSTONE said the new articles of commerce he had found in the course of his travels were chiefly fibrous substances, some of them excessively strong, and one resembling flax, which were found in large quantities on the north bank of the Zambesi. The sugar-cane also grew abundantly, though the natives had no idea of the use of sugar ; and indigo grew wild all over the country. There were acres of it near the village of Tete ; it was, in fact, quite a weed. Wax and honey, quinine and senna, were also among the natural products of the country. Then there were different metals, including very fine iron ore, and malachite, from which copper was extracted. There were also coal-fields, in working which gold was occasionally found. The people, indeed, had been washing for gold from time immemorial, and w ere doing so still. Near to Tete there were no fewer than eleven seams of coal, one of which was fifty-seven inches thick. The country was so fertile that in the gardens cultivated by the natives a constant process of sowing and reaping went on all the year round. It likewise grew immense quantities of grain. Mr. Galion, Mr. 11.1‘Queen, Colonel Steele, Captain Vardon, Mr. Brande, and Mr. Gordon Cumming—all of them travellers in Africa—bore testimony to the value of Dr. Livingstone's discoveries, and to the tact, courage, and unwearied ardour with which he had pursued them. Professor OWEN also adverted to the interesting acquisitions to zoological science likely to accrue from the labours of the distinguished traveller; when the proceedings shortly terminated. On Tuesday evening the London Missionary Society gave Dr. Livingstone a public reception. The Earl of Shaftesbury presided, and in an eloquent address introduced Dr. Livingstone to the meeting. The distinguished traveller then related several anecdotes of African adventure : The African race were very• slow in the motians of their minds, and were in this respect very unlike the South Sea Islanders. You could not meet a single tribe in Africa which had embraced the Gospel at once, as had been the case in the South Sea Islands. An African chief asked him whether he believed his tribe would ever believe without beating them, and entreated his permission to let him beat the Gospel into them. He replied that beating them was not the way to make them believe, but the chief rejoined, " Oh, you don't know them so well as I do. I am sure we could beat belief into them if we tried." They had great c )nfidence in Englishmen, and one chief, Secheli, told him he was going to Queen Victoria. He endeavoured to dissuade him from going, telling him he would have no one to interpret for him. But Secheli would not listen to him, and went to the Cape, a distance of 1,000 miles from his own torn. He was obliged to return, because he could not find the means of getting to England, but he had great confidence in Queen Victoria's wish to see justice done to him. To the north of the Makololo country the Bechuanas were situated : The Boers at the outskirts of civilisation were desirous that the trade with the interior should remain in their hands, and they were determined that no Europeans should open up a communication with the natives He, on the other hand, was determined that the country should be opened up, and he had accordingly opened up two paths into the interior. The vulgar notion that the interior of Africa was a "Great Sahara" was incorrect:— We used to speak of Afric's burning sands, and that was trite of the country south of 20 degrees of latitude. In this dry country the population was small, but further north a very different country and people were found The traveller here came upon the true negro family. This was the country from which we used to derive our slaves in bygone years, and from whicn Cuba and the Brazils drew what slaves were landed upon their shores. In the centre the tribes were civil and kind to him, but hitherto there had always been a fringe of population about them which hal prevented commerce from entering into the interior. They were now delighted to have a path to the sea by which they could trade with the white man. The natives—not like Sydney Smith's South Sea T _ . . upon a missionary as " a thing not to be killed " : He was respected, not because they loved the Gospel, for that came afterwards, but because they saw he laboured for their welfare. He took some natives from the interior to °suds, and persuaded them, not without some mitt. gorings, to go and see the British ships of war there. They had been told by the villagers as they came along that the white wen on board the ships would fatten and eat them ; but when they went on board they were treated most kindly by the sailors, who gave them bread and meat. Afterwards they almost worshipped him, and used to fall at his knees when he spoke to them, until he made them desist. This arose from having seen these proofs of the power of England, and the idea in their unlettered minds seemed to be that if the English were so wise as to make these shins their religion must be true. With respect to the present condition of the slave trade, Dr. Livingstone thought it languishing : The English Government had for a series of years spent large sums of money in the repression of the slave trade. A falsehood had been promulgated by the slave dealers that the exertions of our cruisers only aggravated the hots THE PRESS. rors of the slave trade by increasing the sufferings of the negroes on the middle passage. This was all " bosh." His brother had heard a professor in the United States contend that it would be far better for the English Govern. ment to fit up ships with every convenience for the trans port of negroes than drive the slaveowners to transport in the present slave-ships. But there was no foundation for this assertion. At Angola he found that, owing to the presence of the cruisers, the slave trade had been effectually repressed by making the export of slaves much more dangerous to capitalists than gambling for gold. He had seen slaves sold 100 miles from the coast for 12s. each, for whom it would have been easy to obtain 201. if there bad been a demand abroad, and if it had been easy to convey them to Cuba. Instead of being sent out of the country, these slaves were sent into the interior to be exchanged for ivory. He travelled with a Por►uguese native who was going to Matiamvo with eight women in chains. For merly a great deal of money had been made in Angola by the slave trade, but there were now only three men in Angola who retained any of the wealth they had acquired in that traffic. The riches thus got seemed to bring no blessing with it. It did not " atop in the family." The capabilities of Central Africa were great r The Jesuits with their usual foresight planted coffee in Angola, which had been propagated, it was said by birds, through the whole country. The merchants were now turning their attention to the growth of coffee, and it seemed as if God himself had prepared the way for the extinction of the slave trade by providing a substitute, and offering the means of honest industry to the natives. Then it was said that wars were more cruel than they were when the prisoners were sold for slaves, but this also was an invention of the slave-dealers. Who began these wars? There never was a war in the interior except about cattle. But where the slave•dealers found a market for their prisoners the natives fought fiercely to defend themselves and children. These wars bad been fomented by the slave traders, and they ought to take the credit of them. The best way of suppressing the slave trade entirely was to develop the resources of the interior. In the evening Dr. Livingstone was entertained at dinner by the society at the Milton Club. Dr. Livingstone has on other occasions given interesting accounts of some of the principal incidents of his travels, and he has expressed his intention of shorly returning to Africa to continue his ex• plorations. THE REFORMATORY MOVEMENT was discussed by the Rev. Sydney Turner ou Tuesday evening, in a lecture on " Boy Crime and its Remedies," delivered at the Newington Literary Institution. Mr. Sydney Turner said he bad recently seen in the Economist that crime only affected capitalists or persons with fixed property : He was astonished at such doctrines, which embodied one of the strangest fallacies he had ever seen. The question of boy crime was essentially one which affected the working and middle classes. Whose property did young thieves principally steal? If he went to the Westminster Bridewell, and got the young thieves out, who would they live upon? Would they live upon the property of the Duke of Devonshire, or Lord Palmerston, or even such large firms as Fortnum and Mason's? No, it was the great class of working tradesmen that these young hornets stung. And more than that, it was the children of the poor man that they associated with, and who were exposed to their corruption. He then came to the question of punishment : The great theory of our forefathers was to punish only, and adopting Sir Peter Laurie's theory " to put them down." He should be very glad to adopt that if it answered. He was not one of those amiable philanthro pists who were averse to all secondary punishments. lie considered that in proportion to the knowledge of the offender he should be punished. They had a large number of boys at Redhill; some of them had been in prison six teen times, many for ten times, and a great proportion four or five times. The result was uniformly the same ; he was not deterred by the punishment he had received, and he thought the reason was clear. No person committed crime so much from the love it, but because his habits and his whole course of education had been such as to make petty crime almost a necessity to him. Within the last year—that was from the Ist of January to the present — they had admitted 114 boys into the Beall' Reformatory, and out of that number thirty-one had lost father or mother, the s•irviving parent not re•marrying, sixteen had lost both parents, and twenty-one had lost one parent, the survivor re-marrying. Thus, of toe whole 114, there were sixty eight who passed into society having no one at home to really control them. They could not hang young children,neither could they transport them, or keep them year after year in prison; in fact, no 53 stem of punishment could, by itself, work the required end of diminishing or preventing crime. Seeing. then, that they could not effectually punish or let them alone, they must turn to this mode of cure. In the lrst place, they should do all they could to promote the general morality of the working classes, and endeavour to extirpate the vice of drunkenness, which was the cause of more than half the crime of the country. But while pre• vention as better than cure, reformatory schools were absolutely necessary, and up to the present time they had been successful to the extent of reforming seven out of ten, and in France, at Mettray, they had reformed nine out often. In conclusion, lie reminded them that they could all do much in preventing crime, and he exhorted them to use all their endeavours in their own sphere to assist in this good work. During the delivery of the address the rev. gentleman was frequently cheered. 1209 THE MEANS OF FREEING THE COUNTRY FROM DANGEROUS CRIMINALS was the title of a paper read before the Law Amendment Society this week, by Mr. Frederic Hill, who advocated an extension of summary powers to the magistracy : Crime being now treated as a plaything, he was of opinion that punishment should on all occasions, where no doubt existed, fall full and swiftly. He advised that magistrates should have power given them to cause any suspected persons to be brought before them, and demand to be informed what were their means of living, and in the event of any person so brought before the magis trates not being able to show that they obtained a living by honest means, they should be committed for trial, the proof of innocence being thrown upon the sus• pected person. Coming to the question of ticket of leave, Mr. Hill contended that tickets of leave could not he said either to have failed or succeeded, for they had not yet been fairly tried : The experiment up to the Present time bad been rather satisfactory than otherwise, for the recommitments of per sons released on tickets of leave had been less than the number of those released in consequence of the expiration of their terms of imprisonment. Then one of the great points of the system—the withdrawal of the tickets in the event of their holders being found to be leading a bad life— had never been acted upon, which, no doubt, would have a considerable effect in diminishing crime. A lengthened discussion took place upon the various points in the paper, and several suggestions were made by the various speakers, all of whom were of opinion that the present terms of imprisonment should be greatly increased ; and most of them that suspected persons should be called upon to show how they were getting their living. At this meeting a letter from Lord Brougham was read advocating the reform of the law of libel, and especially pointing out to the attention of the society " the absolute necessity of removing from our law the very dis- creditable peculiarity which distinguishes it, of treating the most criminal breach of trust as no offence, but only a ground of claim to a creditor against his debtor." THE SECOND PERFORMANCE OF THE dadria On Monday night was accompanied by the prologue and epilogue, in which the Westminsters are wont to amuse their friends by a humorous blending of modern fun with the language of old Rome. The prologue, spoken by the Captain, Mr. J. P. Ingham, touched as usual upon topics personal to the school, Sir John Jervis, Dr. Haggard, Dr. Hussey, Dr. Buckland, Dr. Chenevix Trench, all distinguished Westminsters, being the staple of the discourse; be sides allusion- to Miss Slade (the sister of the Dean of Chichester and the foundress of the exhibition and prizes at Christ Church, Oxford, and West minster), and the new decorations by Mr. Cockerel!, which it seems are in store for the embellishment of the plays next. year. The text of the epilogue is American slavery, the fun being confined exclusively to the opening, in which Pamphilus, just returned from the United States, informs a party of grotesque looking blacks, his lacqueys, that they are free; in. dulging afterward; in a somewhat prosaic colloquy with his father, Simo, upon the general question of slavery, and the collision of national and political opinions to which it has given rise. The two prin cipal interlocutors were Mr. Robinson and Mr. Wil liamson. Among the company present on Monday evening were M. Van de Weyer, the Dean of West minster, Sir D. Dundas, Canon Repton, Archdeacon Freer, and other distinguished individuals. THE M BOARD OF WORKS have adopted the Main Drainage Scheme Be, approved by Captain Burstall and Sir Benjamin Hall, under a written protest of the minority. A. LAMENTABLE ACCIDENT occurred at Blackfriars bridge on Sunday evening. A boat laden with seven passengers, four women and three men, was endea vouring to make the stairs on the west side of the bridge, but the tide carried her down against the pier. The four women at once screamed out, rushed to the boat's side, and of course capsized her. Several boats instantly put off, and three men and one woman were saved. The other three women were drowned. THE CONSERVATIVE LAND SOCIETY held its annual meeting on Thursday, when the report of the com mittee was read. The report of the progress of the society was most satisfactory. The receipts for the past year amounted to 5,4,0001., showing an increase of 3,0001. over the previous year. The purchasos of the society had been most advantageous. Lord Banelagh entered at some length into the details of the annual report, which was then unanimously adopted. THE CONCENTRATION OF THE COURTS OF LAW AND EQUITY was proposed to Sir Benjamin Hall on Thursday by a deputation frim the Incorporated Law Society. The deputation, after pointing out the inconvenience of the present courts, both in situation and accommodation, proposed the erection of one central building between Pickett-place and Temple-bar. The site could be bought for SOC.OOo/. Sir Benjamin Hall, after some discussion, suggested that the question must, of course, be referred to Par-