THE PUTUMAYO ATROCITIES.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1774, 12 June 1913, Page 4

THE PUTUMAYO ATROCITIES.

The report of tho Special Committee of the House of Commons appointed to inquire into the Puturnayo atrocities contains a severe condemnation of the terrible treatment the unfortunate Indians have received,. It states that tho brutalities'' were not confincd to Putumayo, which was only a shockingly bad instance of the conditions existing over a wide area of South America. Some two years ago Truth, brought under the notice ot the British public the horrible state of affairs which existed in Putumayo in connsctiftn with the rubber industry. As a result Sir Roger Casement, the British Con-sul-General at Rio de Janeiro, was sent to make inquiries, and his report, which was published as,a Blue Book in July, 1912, stat«d that the charges had been fully proved. The disclosures aroused public indignation in Britain, and the British directors of the Peruvian Amazon Company came in for some severe criticism. In a strikingly outspoken sermon in Westminster Abbey, Dean Henson dealt with the position of the directors with the "gloves off." He said "the actual perpetrators ot

these foul deeds, which havo destroyed so many thousands of Indians, are beyond our reach. . . . But their employers, with whoso guilty, even if i unknowing, connivance their crimes were committed, and who shared out the blood-stained gains which they transmitted, arc here among us. Is it not the irreducible demand of justice that these men, and notably their leader, the archorganiser of tho whole tragedy, Ahana, should be arrested and brought to public trial V' Such an indictment from tho pulpit- of Westminster Abbey could not be allowed to pass unnoticed, and the solicitors for the directors replied to Dean .Henson in a letter to The Times; but the Dean was more than able to hold his own, and certainly had the best of the argument. It was understood, however, that the matter complained of did not come within the reach of British law; but the Committee, in its report, expresses the opinion that the existing slave law should be consolidated and modernised, and that the principle of extra-territorial crime should be extended to enable British offenders in forced labour cases to be brought to trial in their own country. The report of the Committee and the world-wide publicity which has been fiven to the ill-treatment of South merican natives is sure to have a wholesome effect. In future it will not be so easy for such brutalities to be repeated without protest, or for tho perpetrators to go unpunished. As Dean Henson stated "it is high time that tho Great Powers, who constitute the executive of civilisation, should agree to take these helpless people out of that defenceless condition, to make an end of the absurd fiction whereby they are clothed with so much, and no more, of the attributes of free agents as shall enable them to part with their lands and their liberty, and shall bring them under the protection of some humane international agreement."