A DESPERATE SITUATION.
“The first man was able to hobble into camp, but the second had to be carried in, more dead than alive. He had two frightful wounds, one through the shoulder, the other beneath the ribs. I dressed them, and set two natives to watch him through the night, lest he should bleed to death. When I came in, on my last visit before retiring, I found the nurses busy blowing on the wound. Their conception of pain was that it is due to evil spirits, and they were exorcising them by blowing. As they were doing no harm, I permitted them to indulge in their work through the night. The patient had a hard siege of it, but finally got well. He did not readily forget his adventure with the buffalo bull.”
STANLEY AND EMIN.
The London Spectator brings Henry M. Stanley and Emin Pasha into strong contrast in its discussion of the celebrated rescue. It chooses to regard the rescue as of greater psychological than of historic or scientific interest to the world, and says. “The revelation it affords is the radical difference in character between the two great African adventurers. For years past, Emin Pasha has seemed to be the greater of the two, a man who actually ruled, and in a degree civilized, great African provinces, who had by his character alone maintained his ascendency over a body of successful Mohammedan troops, and who had earned, if not the love, at least the respect and regard, of millions of black subjects. It now appears that some part of all this success must have been accidental. The trusted troops revolted on their first great opportunity—as, we must in justice remember, did also our own Sepoys—the obedient blacks proved equally obedient to the new Arab authority; and Emin himself stood revealed as a thoughtful man of science, patient and unfearing, but with little either of the energy or the decision which make the true man of action. It may be that in his long sojourn at Wadelai, surrounded by Egyptians and blacks, possibly taking native wives, for we hear of a young daughter named Ferida, and conforming to the ritual of an Asiatic faith, Emin may have become Africanized; but no change of conditions could deprive him of the power of recognizing men, had he originally possessed
it. That he erred in his judgment of his agents is clear, for they mutinied against and imprisoned him; his hope that they would follow him to the coast, and thence to Egypt, turned out as baseless as the hope of many an old Sepoy officer that his ‘children’ at least would never mutiny; and to the last, one native officer, if Stanley’s account may be trusted, deluded the experienced Viceroy like a child.
“One suspects, though perhaps the suspicion may be unfair, that he owed much of his apparent success to his profession of Mohammedanism—which up to the very last induced his followers to draw a distinction between the Pasha, who was only led away, and Jephson and Casati, who are called wicked Christians, and suspected of designs against their own Egyptian soldiers—and of his reputation in Europe to his feeling for science and civilization, a cause which also produced the much too favorable estimate of the Emperor of Brazil. On the other hand, the more the true man of action is tried, the stronger he appears. Perhaps no man that ever lived had his energy and endurance more taxed than Henry M. Stanley, who for years on end has suffered all that any great African explorer has suffered, with the addition of heavy responsibility to and for others, and who through it all has steadily grown greater in himself as well as in the world’s eyes. Statesmen would now trust the lad from the Welsh workhouse with African kingdoms to govern, and the new sovereign companies, who claim such immense districts, will compete with each other for his aid. He has the qualities which make rulers, and it is in the end on these, and not on amiability and feeling for science, or even a perplexed devotion to doubtful duty, that statesmen must rely. We shall do nothing in Africa by passing and repassing through its endless forests. We must govern, organize, and above all train its people, before anything is accomplished; and for that work we need the service of men who, like Stanley, know that the one cure for savagery is discipline, and can enforce it to the end.”
DINING ON THE BANKS OF THE UPPER SHIRE.