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Expiring Laws Continuance Bill passed through

West Highland Railway Guarantee Bill was withdrawn.

Purchase of Land (Ireland) Amendment Bill read second time.

3. Consolidated Fund (Appropriation) Bill read

Public Offices (Acquisition of Site) Bill read third time.

Debate on Indian affairs. 20 som

Expiring Laws Continuance Bill read third time. Purchase of Land (Ireland) Bill read third time. 4. Consolidated Fund (Appropriation) Bill passed through Committee, s

Lord George Hamilton made a statement as to the financial condition of India.

5. Consolidated Fund (Appropriation) Bill read third time.

Sept. 2. Mr. Finlay, M.P., at Inverness, on the
NOTABLE UTTERANCES.
Foreign Policy of England.

Mr. W. S. Caine, at Memorial Hall, on the
Cardinal Vaughan, at Bristol, on Reunion.
Temperance Party

Mr. John Burns, at Battersea, on the Trade
Union Congress.

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27. Tasmania agreed to co-operate with New South Wales in equipping an Antarctic Exploring Expedition.

British Columbian Sealers asked for Arbitration bire their claim against the United States on account of the seizures of vessels in Behring Sea. 28. Lord Lamington appointed Governor of Queensland.

Sir Walter Wilkin elected new Lord Mayor of
London for 1895-96.

Great Britain sent an ultimatum to China demanding the degradation of the Viceroy of Szu-chuan within fourteen days. Japanese Police arrested a man who had planned to assassinate Marquis Ito. 30. Autumnal Meeting of Congregational Union. British Ultimatum accepted by China-the Vice

roy of Szu-chuan to be degraded for ever, and subordinate Officials to be arraigned. National Temperance Congress opened at Chester.

Lower House of the Hungarian Diet passed the remaining Ecclesiastico-Political Bills; and. the Budget Statement was submitted.

BY-ELECTIONS.

Aug. 31. Inverness Burghs :

Mr. R. B. Finlay, Q.C., on his appointment as
Solicitor-General, was returned unopposed.

Sept. 2. Dublin (St. Stephen's Green):

On the appointment of Mr. Kenny as SolicitorGeneral for Ireland, a by-election was held with the following result:

Mr. W. Kenuy (DL)

Mr. Pierce Mahony (P)

At the General Election:(DL) 3,661, (P) 3,205-majority, 456.

6. South Kerry:

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A by-election was hell here with the following

result:

Mr. T. G. Farrell (N)

Mr. W, Murphy (Healyite)

At the General Election Mr. D. Kilbride (N) was

returned unopposed.

12. Limerick:

Mr. John Daly being declared unfit to sit as a Member of Parliament, a by-election was held

with the following result :

F. A. O'Keefe (AP)..

J. Nolan (P)

At the General Election Mr. Daly (1) was

returned unopposed.

passed all its stages. Parliament was prorogued until Nov. 18th.

Sept. 3. Report of Ways

HOUSE OF COMMONS.

and Meaps (Aug. 31st) agreed to. Appropriation Bill read first time.. Canadian Speaker (Appointment Deputy) Bill read third time.

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SIR DOUGLAS GALTON, K.C.B. President of the British Association, 1895.

(Photograph by Elliott and Pry.)

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KHAMA, CHIEF OF THE BAMANGWATO.

I fear Lo Bengula less than I fear brandy. I fought Lo Bengula when he had his father's great warriors from Natal, and drove him back, and he never came again, and God who helped me then would help me again. Lo Bengula never gives me. a sleepless night. But to fight against drink is to fight against demons, and not against men. I dread the white man's drink more than all the assegais of the Matabele, which kill men's bodies, and is quickly over, but drink puts devils into men, and destroys both their souls and their bodies for ever. Its wounds never heal. I pray your Honour never to ask me to open even a little door to the drink.-Letter from Khama to Sir Sydney Sheppard, March 7th, 1888.

HAMA, chief of the Bamangwato, who has this

of England, on n'mission to the

Colonial Office, would make a delightful figure in the romantic story of the Medieval Church. He is too. near to us to-day for us to see the full significance of his character. For Khama is a portent in his way. Clovis, King of the Franks, whose conversion is celebrated in that petrified poem, the Cathedral at Rheims, in his day, and to his Franks, somewhat resembled the chief of the Bamangwato, although the latter is no doubt a much more exemplary personage. The spectacle of the first ruler of a fighting race who accepts Christianity is always full of interest. These conversions mark the watershed of historical epochs. Usually the new convert is a convert in little but in name; the grace of Christian baptism veneers but slightly the hereditary paganism, and it is difficult to say whether the royal convert is a greater scandal or a greater support to the true faith. In the case of Khama it is not so. The son of an African chief, who was frankly heathen, with working faith save a hideous devotion to a murderous species of witchcraft, he is

no

canon of the Hebrew Scriptures, which is responsible for the regeneration of Khama. In his own picturesque phrase, he is one of the people of the Word of God." He is a trophy of the Holy Book, a sample to be seen

and known of all men of the power of the Bible. And inasmuch as it has achieved this miracle in his case, we may be encouraged to hope and believe that it may be not less efficacious in the case of other savages, not only of the royal variety, with which this world abounds. Here is indeed a triumph of grace over nature. Here is an African illustration that while heredity is strong, it is not invincible. Khama is the son of a chieftain in whose veins ran the blood of unbroken.series of generation of savages. His father was a heathen of the old school, who held the doctrine of heredity in all its integrity.

"It is all very good for you white men to follow the Word of God," he once told Mr. Mackenzie. "God made you with straight hearts; but it is a very different thing with us black people. God made us with a crooked heart. No, do not oppose me; I know I am right. Your heart is white from your birth; the hearts of all black people are black and bad." "Nay, Sekhome," said the good missionary, "those who turn to God get a new heart and better thoughts."

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(From a photograph by Pickering, the Garden Studio, Leicester.)

as exemplary a Christian as if he had been the son of an English bishop, or a deacon at Mr. Spurgeon's Tabernacle. It is strange, indeed, to find this fair flower of a saintly life suddenly blossoming out of the very thorny stem of a barbarous heathendom. But the fact is undisputed and indisputable. Khama's life for thirty years at least has been lived in the full blaze of that fierce light which beats upon the throne, even the throne of an African chief. And there is only one verdict. Trader and soldier, traveller and missionary, hunter and scientist, alike concur in one verdict-Khama, chief of the Bamangwato, is a gentleman and a Christian. Such a man coming amongst us at such a time will well repay our study.

The Book of Job, as Carlyle was fond of reminding us, helped to build St. Paul's Cathedral. It was the same old Book, and the other sacred writings bound up in the

"Not black people," he interrupted. "And yet," he added, after a pause, " and yet after all Khama's heart is perhaps white. Yes, Khama's heart is white."

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Sekhome," said the missionary, "why should not you enter the Word of God, as Khama has done? And this is what Sekhome replied.. Monare, you don't know what you say. The Word of God is far from When I think of entering the Word of God, I can compare it to nothing except going out to the plain and meeting single-handed all the forces of the Matabele. That is what it would be for me now to enter the Word of God."

me.

A bold and vigorous metaphor. Sekhome died as he had lived, a heathen outside the Word. But even he admitted that Khama's heart was white-a quality which

he certainly did not inherit from sire or grandsire. How, then, did it come to pass that Khama is not as his fathers were?

I. THE APOSTLES OF AFRICA.

To answer that question it is necessary to refer to the succession of saintly and heroic men who preached and taught, and, more than all, who lived Christianity in South Africa. Khama's virtues may be regarded as the fruit of a Christian graft, carefully grafted upon the native stock by Livingstone, Moffat and Mackenzie. Of these three notable and mighty heralds of the Cross, the last had much the most to do in the making of Khama. Khama is reported to have been baptised when a youth by a Lutheran missionary; but it was the men of the London Missionary Society who had, and still have, the task of guiding the steps and developing the mind of their notable convert. The figures of these missionaries loom large and clear against the African sky. They are figures of the familiar type of the Christian Apostle. You come upon their medieval prototypes in every page of the great story of the civilisation of Europe. The record of their lives reads like pages torn from the chronicles of the Venerable Bede. Carlyle has declared that Napoleon would some day be remembered only because he existed during the lifetime of Goethe; and many a once prominent British official in South Africa is even now only known to the public at home because he helped or hindered the missionary work of Livingstone or Moffat. These men rank with the public at large as the real heroes of Africa. For the most part South African history is a hideous welter of anarchy and carnage. Not until Mr. Rhodes and Dr. Jamieson smote down, as with the bolt of avenging Jove, the foul fabric of systematised slaughter in Matabeleland, could we regard our warfare in those regions other than with shame and confusion of face. But clear athwart the southern sky, visible and understood of all men, stand the preachers and the teachers to whom more than to any other men we owe our knowledge of the country, and to whom the natives owe their knowledge of civilisation and Christianity.

JOHN MACKENZIE.

Conspicuous among these pioneers of progress other than that which rides in powder-carts and smuggles its way with the brandy barrel, stand the two missionaries of the Bamangwato, the Rev. John Mackenzie and the Rev. T. D. Hepburn. An old schoolfellow of mine, young, earnest, enthusiastic, whose name would have been not unworthy to mention with theirs, had he lived, fell by the way almost before his course had begun. To the pyramid of laborious effort which the emissaries of the Cross have reared in Austral Africa he contributed little more than a grave, but that forgotten tomb in deserted Shoshong is the symbol of the same glorious zeal and systematic self-sacrifice which distinguish his more famous colleagues. Who is there in South Africa or in Great Britain who is not more or less familiar with the Rev. John Mackenzie, the man who saved Bechuanaland and the whole South African Hinterland for the Empire? Well was it for the future, both of Africa and of the British Empire, that thirty years ago our country found so sturdy and so stalwart a sentinel to stand in the gap, through which, but for him, Boers and Germans would long since have poured to the utter undoing of all the northward expansion of our race. For years past Mackenzie, the man who held the pass, has disappeared from the public gaze, leaving behind him his two bulky volumes, Austral Africa: Losing It or Ruling It." He is preaching and teaching

and labouring away in some obscure corner of the mission-field. But for years before that he spent the whole of his time and energies, which seemed literally inexhaustible, in rousing the British people to a sense of their responsibilities and opportunities in those distant regions which lie between Cape Colony and the Zambesi.

THE SAVIOUR OF THE HINTERLAND.

It fell to the lot of Mr. Rhodes, a master-workman in politics and finance, to complete the work, and to add Mashonaland and its annexes as far as the Great Lakes to the British Empire. But except Mackenzie had sowed the seed and ploughed the ground, Mr. Rhodes could never have gone forth to the harvest to return bearing his sheaves with him. What an indefatigable man it was, that brave and stubborn Scot, whose mild blue eyes twinkled mirthfully out from beneath his great bushy eyebrows, and whose speech, although copious, seemed often quite inadequate to express the passionate intensity of his convictions. How he wrote and canvassed and prayed and preached and worried every one all round in those days very few people know. He laboured for the saving of South Africa as a pious missioner labours for the soul of an interesting penitent. "I never see Mackenzie going along the street," said Sir A. Milner to me in the old Pall Mall days, "without feeling that I am in the presence not of a man so much as of a resolution. If he turns this way or that, if he goes up this street or that alley, I seem to know that it is because that by taking the turn he did and no other he could the sooner reach the establishment of British supremacy over Bechuanaland." An Imperial patriot of the highest type is John Mackenzie, one of those good, honest, upright men whose unshaken testimony and whose deep conviction as to the real character of our rule silences the doubts which are so often engendered by the vauntings of Jingoes and the scheming of speculators, to whom each new possession is not a sacred trust to be administered, but only so much booty to be plundered.

JAMES D. HEPBURN.

Hepburn, Mackenzie's colleague and successor, I never had the privilege of meeting. But if we may judge him from the book, "Twenty Years in Khama's Country," which Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton have just published, he was not unworthy of the apostolical succession from Livingstone and Moffat. He also was a man upright and fearless, laborious and resourceful, who deservedly commanded the love and confidence of his extensive diocese. In reading his letters we find ourselves transported to the times of the Old Testament. Mr. Hepburn lived as much in the region of miracle as the prophet Samuel. He may have been mistaken-of course the wise men will be offended even at the supposition of the contrary-but to him the Infinite Ruler of the Universe was very much the same prayer-hearing and prayeranswering God as the Deity who solved the doubts of Gideon or sent down fire from heaven at the great national God-test suggested by Elijah. Mr. Hepburn was of the type of the warrior saints of the faith if not of the lineage of Cromwell.

OF THE LINEAGE OF CROMWELL.

"To me," he says on one occasion, "it is prayer if it is also rifles." After recording the repeated discomfiture of the invading impis of Lobengula by the much despised Bamangwato, he says:

Just now I attributed their defeat to the precision of the rifle, and so to the outward vision it was; but when Khama went out with his rifle to give Lobengula the mark of the

bullet wound which he carries to-day, he first knelt in prayer with Mr. Mackenzie on the top of the Shoshong Hills to that God who is higher than hilltops and is able to throw down the mighty from their seats.

The story of the last rain-making in Bechuanaland might have been taken out of the Book of Judges, and the tale of the famine that followed the feast of the circumcision resembles the traditions of the wandering in the Wilderness. Khama from his accession had set his face against the old rites of his tribe, which probably represented an earlier religious revelation, but which in time had become corrupt and mischievous. At the time of the sowing of seed Khama held a prayer meeting, but when the harvest was about

to be reaped the Bamangwato, despite their chief, declared that they must hold the festival of the circumcision according to the rites of their heathen ancestors. Khama was powerless to prevent them. The girls vowed they would marry no'man who had not been to the ceremony. The old men took the law into their own hands and made ready for the rite. Then stood up Mr. Mackenzie and rebuked them, saying:

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You have prayed for rain,

and now your fields are full to overflowing, and your old men are about to take the first-fruits and give them over to the old ceremony; and this is how you thank God."

The protest was unheeded by the Bamangwato. The ceremony of the circumcision was duly observed, but Mr. Hepburn thus records the sequel:-

The day that the company marched out of the town to go to the veldt to perform the ceremony there was a thin drizzling rain. From that day not a drop fell and the corn in the gardens was literally burnt up. They lost their harvest. Famine crept on slowly and steadily. The dead were left unburied.

and the like, says that Khama came to him and asked him what he should do. He replied:

"Do what a Christian only can do, Khama; lay it all before God. I pointed to the example of Hezekiah and Nehemiah in their times of distress. We pleaded with God publicly for rain. A neighbouring chief sent Khama a taunting message: You are the wise man. Go on praying, that's the proper thing to do. You are the man with wisdom.' It was hard for Khama to hold his ground. We held a week of prayer, and the blessing of rain came in torrents."

So the good missionary records his conviction on the subject as follows:

I can see a:.d have seen that God hears and answers prayer

to-day as much as in the times of patriarchs, prophets, and apostles. "Water." you say, "won't flow in the desert, and especially it won't flow up a sandy hill in the desert, if you pray ever so earnestly for it." I'm not so sure about that. Perhaps it will, if your necessities absolutely require it, and you have not become too learned to be able to pray for it in the simplicity of your heart.

The learned may deride the simple faith of the Christian rain-maker, but

it was this faith based on the classic precedents of Nehemiah and Hezekiah that Christianised Bechuanaland and made Khama, the son of Sekhome, the ruler that he is to-day.

IL-WAR AND WITCHCRAFT.

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The resemblance between the history of the Bamangwato and that of the tribes of Israel extends to other things besides a simple faith in the direct intervention of Providence in the affairs of man. The history of the tribe for several years before Khama. acquired undisputed control was much the same as the history of the later kings of Israel. It is one of almost constant warfare -father warring against son and brother fighting against brother, the result of petty broils and internecine disputes concerning the succession. In this the story differs little from the history of other South African tribes. The one original feature is the cause of the dispute. In most cases personal ambition dominates everything. In the history of the Bamangwato we find the novelty introduced of a series of dynastic troubles, due originally to religious differences.

THE REV. J. D. HEPBURN.

Old women were found in the fields eating grass or hidden in the caves to die. Notwithstanding all that was done, a great many people died, especially the old people.

It was the last ceremony of circumcision for the Bamang wato. They wanted to go to finish the ceremony the next year, but Khama said, "No, we have had enough of that to satisfy us all."

PRAYER AND RAIN-MAKING.

So circumcision died out among the Bamangwato. But it was not merely circumcision that perished: rain-making was suppressed in much the same way, not so much by scientific demonstration of the immutability of the Divine law as by the evidence that the Christian by his prayer had better ho'd of the Invisible Raingiver than the heathen professional. Mr. Hepburn, after describing the afflictions of Khama from drought, Boer aggressions,

THE RELIGION OF KHAMA'S ANCESTORS.

Sekhome, Khama's father, was a heathen of the old school. Khama, his son, was a Christian convert who had attended the school at the mission station from his youth up. As soon as Khama came to man's

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