are sacrificed to its demands. The royal house on the Zambesi is the very hot-bed of superstition; magic is the pretext under which the worst of barbarities are perpetrated, and the people, associating the enormities with the sovereigns who sanction them, learn at once to dread and hate their rulers. To deliver the people of the district from their superstitious credulity, would be to remove the greatest hindrance that exists to their future civilization.
Among the Marutse the king has a despotic power extending to the land as well as to the population; until the time however of the present ruler, whose rule is that of a tyrant, it has very rarely happened that any king has stretched his right to interfere with private property. During their own lifetime the reigning sovereigns appoint their successors; these may be of either sex, provided they are born of a Marutse mother—and women are especially welcome as sovereigns among the northern tribes, on the presumption that they are less cruel than men. Amongst the Bechuanas, who are more conservative in their instincts, the eldest son of the principal wife is always recognized as the rightful heir, and so strictly is this rule enforced, that even if the king should die before the heir is born, the eldest son of the widowed queen by another husband would still be held to be the legitimate successor to the throne. In 1875 Sepopo appointed his little daughter of six years of age to be queen at his own demise; by right his eldest daughter Moquai should have been nominated, but as she had been formally designated as the proper sovereign of the Mabundas, he feared that she already had too many friends and supporters in that district, to make it
