DAVID LIVINGSTONE

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 149, 20 December 1929, Page 17

DAVID LIVINGSTONE

HIS NAME HONOURED

MEMORIAL OF HIS LIFE

David Livingstone has never been among the prophets who lack honour in. their own country. The house in which he was born, says the "Daily Telegraph," has now been made into a Scottish National Memorial of his life and work. It is a tenement building of homes of one room. These have become a. museum and a picture gallery, and on their walla are sculptured panels in which Livingstone's achievements are portrayed. One of these is the gift of King Khama's tribe, others of missionary, philanthropic, and scientific societies. That room in the tenement at Blantyre which was the home of his family must have seen much burning of midnight oil. David Livingstone was sent to work in a cotton mill at 10 years old, but he went on studying in an evening school and at home until late at night, ihough he had to be back in the mill by six in the morning. 'In this way he learnt Latin, and something of botany, zoology, and geology, and at 19 he was fit to attend the classes of the university. He paid his fees out of his wages as a cottonspinner. No man ever had a better right to tell others, as he did, to "fear God and work hard." HIS RELIGIOUS SPIRIT. He was in his twentieth year when he first felt strong" religious impulse. "In the glow of love which Christianity inspires," he wrote, "I soon resolved to devote my life to the alleviation of human misery." He qualified as a medical practitioner, and went out to Africa as a missionary. When he reached Cape Town in 1841, missionaries had not penetrated further north that Bechuanaland. The interior was impenetrable by white men, an unknown land, a prey to the diseases and the iniquities of barbarism. Livingstone led the way on into the utmost darkness of Africa. He was himself able to solve many of the main problems. What he did and what he left undone became alike a challenge for other men, a challenge to the spirit of adventure and inquiry, and a challenge to chivalry and philanthropy. He gave the inspiration for the great march through "Darkest Africa," which Stanley was commissioned to lead by the "Daily Telegraph," and which opened the vast territories in the centre of the continent to the peace and justice of civilisation. "The work of his life," said Sir Bartle Frere, will surely be held up in ages to come as one of singular nobleness of design and of unflinching energy and selt-sacrifice in execution." History has no record of a man who alone did so much to change the. conditions of a continent as David Livingstone.