186 UGANDA AND THE EGYPTIAN SOUDAN.

tobacco plants are not allowed to seed, the flowerbuds being picked off before they open.

The servants in Uganda are all slaves, the majority being born in slavery, and a tolerable percentage are prisoners, children mostly, taken in war. They are, as a rule, fairly well off, and are not often badly treated ; but of course they are liable to be sold to the Arab and half-breed traders for guns, ammunition, cloth, etc. They often live on terms of familiar intercourse with their masters, and are treated as part of the family. Their condition more closely resembles that of the Eussian serfs before their emancipation than that of the slaves at Zanzibar and on the East Coast. One of the principal evils resulting from slavery in Uganda is that it causes all manual labour to be looked upon as derogatory to the dignity of a free man, and this is one of the most formidable obstacles which the missionary and philanthropist encounter on trying to elevate the people and introduce legitimate trade and commerce.

Polygamy is universal in Uganda, from Mtesa, who is said to have seven thousand so-called wives, down to the poorest mkopi, or peasant, who can scrape together enough to buy a couple. As a natural result immorality is frightfully common, and all the more so owing to the vast harems of the king and chiefs absorbing a large part of the female population, so that many of the lower orders cannot get wives. The marriage bond is a very loose one, and