“there are instances of parents throwing their tender offspring to the hungry lion, who stands roaring before their cavern, refusing to depart till some peace-offering be made to him.”

He adds that after a quarrel between husband and wife the one beaten is apt to take revenge by killing their child; and that, on various occasions, parents smother their children, cast them away in the desert, or bury them alive without remorse.  Murder is an amusement, and is considered a praiseworthy act.  Livingstone (M.T., 159) tells of a Bushman who thought his god would consider him a “clever fellow” because he had murdered a man, two women, and two children.  When fathers and mothers become too old to be of any use, or to take care of themselves, they are abandoned in the desert to be devoured alive by wild beasts.  “I have often reasoned with the natives on this cruel practice,” says the missionary Moffat (99); “in reply to which, they would only laugh.”  “It appears an awful exhibition of human depravity,” he adds, “when children compel their parents to perish for want, or to be devoured by beasts of prey in a desert, from no other motive but sheer laziness.” Kicherer says there are a few cases of “natural affection” sufficient to raise these creatures to “a level with the brute creation,” Moffat, too, refers to exceptional cases of kindness, but the only instance he gives (112) describes their terror on finding he had drunk some water poisoned by them, and their gladness when he escaped—­which terror and gladness were, however, very probably inspired not by sympathy but by the idea of punishment at causing the death of a white man.  Chapman himself, the chosen champion of the Bushmen, relates (I., 67) how, having heard of Bushmen rescuing and carrying home some Makalolos whom they had found dying of thirst in the desert, he believed it at first; but he adds: 

“Had I at that time possessed a sufficient knowledge of native character, I should not have been so credulous as to have listened to this report, for the idea of Bushmen carrying human beings whom they had found half dead out of a desert implies an act of charity quite inconsistent with their natural disposition and habits.”

Barrow declares (269) that if Bushmen come across a Hottentot guarding his master’s cattle,

“not contented with putting him to immediate death, they torture him by every means of cruelty that their invention can frame, as drawing out his bowels, tearing off his nails, scalping, and other acts equally savage.”

They sometimes bury a victim up to the neck in the ground and thus leave him to be pecked to death by crows.

“LOVE IN ALL THEIR MARRIAGES”

And yet—­I say it once more—­we are asked to believe there is “love in all the marriages” of these fiendish creatures—­beings who, as Kicherer says, live in holes or caves, where they “lie close together like pigs in a sty” and of whom Moffat declares that with the exception of Pliny’s Troglodites “no tribe or people are surely more brutish, ignorant, and miserable.”  Our amazement at Chapman’s assertion increases when we examine his argument more closely.  Here it is (I., 258-59):