Slave Holders

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 3, 18 January 1906, Page 1

Slave Holders

Some evil traditions live long and die hard. Just a century ago, English Tories were making dramatic appeals to the British public against the abolition of slavery in England. To-day they are again on bended knees, beseeching the British voter to stay his hand and let servitude still endure under the shelter of the Union

Jack in the gold-mines of the Rand. Little more than a hundred years agone, the Tories supported the traffic in human flesh because from it flowed half the wealth of Liverpool, owing to the vast and long-continued monopoly in slave-dealing which had been won by the victor/ies of Marlborough. To-day they stand for W- big monopoly of slave-importation, in the interests of a knot of hook-beaked capitalists with mostly German names. But the slave-traffic, and (in 1807') slavery itself were abolished by what we may by anticipation call a Liberal Ministry, in the teeth of stubborn opposition by Tory obscurantists and their capitalist friends. History seems about to repeat itself in this year of grace 1906. Another Liberal Administration is— again in the face of Tory opposition— sounding the death-knell of slavery in the Rand. ' If,' said Sir H. O. CampbellBannerman a few days ago, ' a representative Legislature desires Chinese in South Africa, we do not desire to meddle, but Chinese labor under conditions bearing a taint of servitude cannot be tolerated within the King's dominions. The Balfour Government must bear the responsibility of that villainous system. It is too bad to denounce the present Government, even <if it has blundered in trying to get rid of the evil. 1 * Cowper sang, though somewhat in advance of events, the song of liberation :■— 1 Slaves cannot breathe in England ; if their lungs Receive our air, that moment they are free ; They touch our country, and their shackles fall.' In the outlying members of the Empire freedom camfl later to the slave. On August 28, 1833, King William IV. affixed his signature to a Bill for the emancipation of all slaves throughout the British colonies. The Act came into force on August 1, 1834. That was the new year's day of year one of negro freedom in the outskirts of the Empire. It was a splendid piece of philanthropy, and cheap at the £20,000,000 in minted sovereigns which it took to satisfy the claims of the slave-owners. Years afterwards, Great Britain risked war with the United States rather than glive up the fugitive slave Anderson, who had killed one of his pursuers and escaped to Canadian soil. Yet, a short time afterwards, when the great American Civil War broke out, English statesmen, clergymen, journalists, and the vast mass of ' the classes ' in Great Britain were, strangely enough, enthusiastic supporters of the slaveholding South against the Abolitionist North. It was a passing lapse from grace. The legalising of serfdom under the flag in South Africa is another. The fordign millionaires on the Rand and their English confreres want to fob more millions— at shent. per shent. The cheaper the labor the bigger their profits. British workers are fastidious enough to wish to live like human beings— as they did in the days of Oom Paul. Even Kaffir labor is too dear to suit the purses of the Rand millionaires. So, hey ! for Chinese cheap labor ; and ho ! for the slant-eyed pagan chattels from the slums of the Distant East, that are content to live on rice and tubers, and to pig together in sweltering prison-pens called compounds. The hard-fisted monopolists of theTransvaal are shaking in the face of the British pubMu the bogey of vanishing dividends. So did the Liverpool slavers more than a century ago. But in the one caso as in the other the bogey was only a limp old rag doll, with most of the sawdust knocked out of it. Liverpool survived the abolition of the slave-traffic. The Transvaal will outlive the deportation of its last pigtailed serf. Against the coming reform, the nabobs of the Rand are puffing like a fumarole. But humanity will sing a ,Te Deum over the final passing of, serfdom from its last great stronghold in the Empire. It was abolished by the Church in England in the old Catholic days. The Reformation revived it. It is high time for the publiic executioner to get his slip-knot around the neck of the ' villainous system ' of servitude now in force in the Transvaal mines.