dream. No scheme of salvation for women can be worked out which is not involved in the salvation of man, or rather of the trinity of man, woman and child, which is, for sociological The Quarterly Review.

purposes, one and indivisible. The book which views the feminist movement from this point of view has yet to be written.

Ethel Colquhoun.

Early in 1888, the Archbishop of Algiers began a campaign in Brussels Cathedral against slavery. One can imagine that fashionable congregation tripping up the steps under the majestic Gothic towers of Saint Gudule Cathedral, and flowing with rustle of silk and murmur of low voices into the great aisle, where the fragrance of scent and flowers mingled with the incense from the altar; and then that sermon against slavery, telling of men, women, and children torn from their homes, shackled, chained together, lashed. How strangely it must have fallen on that elegant throng.

The matter did not end there, for the Archbishop had great dreams, and longed to evangelize Africa. Already he had founded the Order of White Fathers, and little companies of men in flowing white burnouses and scarlet caps had spread over the north of the Dark Continent, and penetrated far down into the remote regions of the great lakes, Nyanza and Tanganyika. And while the good Fathers were rising at five to face drenching dews and burning fevers of tropical forests and plains, their founder was spreading his campaign over Europe with a fierce eloquence. Anti-slavery was more popular in those days than it is now, and that year Germany and ourselves bombarded the coast of Zanzibar against the traffic of human flesh.

Into soil thus prepared, the late Marquis of Salisbury dropped good seed, for in September, 1888, we find him

proposing that King Leopold

should invite all the Powers to meet and confer on the gradual suppression of the African slave trade. As a result of this, in November, 1889, a Conference met at Brussels at which the plenipotentiaries of all the great Powers, after thirty-two sittings, drew up in the name of Almighty God a hundred articles to put an end to the slave traffic, and to improve the condition of native races. And while this solemn conclave representing all civilization was sitting, and a dignitary of the Catholic Church was urging the rights of the slave, let us see what was actually taking place in the over-sea realms of one of the signatories, His Majesty, Dom Carlos, King of Portugal and Algarves.

In the fifteenth century when the Portuguese were the boldest sailors in the world, they had discovered in the Gulf of Guinea, close to the Equator, two mountainous islands which they named S. Thomé and Principe. These islands, 400 square miles in area, have a rich soil and steaming atmosphere. In 1890 they were on the rising tide of the new and lucrative culture of cocoa, and that year exported three thousand tons of the dried cocoa beans.

The Portuguese is said to be so lazy that he will not drink coffee in the morning lest it should keep him awake all day, but the men who opened up these islands showed a fierce, indomitable energy. They made some sort of shelter against the storms, and in spite of heat and fever they cleared spaces in the tangled, dripping forests, and

and the sun sank into the sea in wild splendors of gold and crimson and green, did they long for the wider horizon they had left, and the village of huts where earthen pots bubbled over the logs, and slim, laughing girls came back from the fields with baskets on their heads? And when from their mountain fastness they saw the morning sun make a tract of light on the water, did they plot to steal a boat and follow that path of hope across the sea, eastward and homeword? Whatever they thought we know that the pains of the body gripped them, that the cold mountain air clung to their half-naked limbs till they shivered at night, and that hunger gnawed at them by day, for with their crude bows and arrows with wooden barbs they could hardly get birds and would be dependent on rats for flesh; possibly with luck, they might now and then get a white-bellied monkey as he darted up the bole of a tree. For most of them that desperate picnic did not last long. At the end of the year all had been recaptured or had returned-all but fourteen of the fiftyfour. The loss of these fourteen was hard on the shareholders, because even then Angolans cost over twenty pounds each.

The next year the mortality was again very high on the same estate. However, the management was still cheerful, and ended a paragraph on the subject with the astounding conclusion that the mortality (about 200 per 1,000) was already normal and likely to diminish.

Now let a missionary tell where these unfortunates came from and how they travelled. Just after the signing of the Brussels Act, Mr. D. Crawford, near Lake Dilolo, six hundred miles in the Angolan interior, wrote:

"I have still vividly before me a sad, heart-rending sight, a slave caravan on the march. It numbered, perhaps,

eight hundred all told. This travelling mass of humanity had been months on the road. There were aged men and women, whose poor, shrivelled forms told of the welcome release awaiting them; mothers with babies on their backs, one just born this morning; and tall, strongly built young women and girls, some of them with fine features, carrying heavy loads. One had fallen behind, seemingly quite unable to carry the load that had been given her. I appeared on the scene just in time to see her inhuman master beat her unmercifully on the head with a club, yelling out a threat at every stroke."

After the great anti-slavery measure, the Brussels Act, had been in force for fifteen years, I was sent out to Portuguese West Africa to investigate colored labor. Slavery was in full swing, for that year the labor imported to the islands was nearly three times as much as it had been when the Act was signed.

While in S. Thomé and Principe I stayed at a number of the plantations, riding about the estates with the planters and smoking and gossiping on

their balconies. I saw thousands of laborers at work, lined up for inspection at night, lying in hospitals, or loitering about the open spaces round their huts. The more plantations I visited, the better I liked the planters, and the less I liked the system of labor. I saw a great deal in five months, for my hosts had men and horses to serve their guests; but it is difficult to explain a life so different from civilization. Ordinary words have different values there.

Try for a moment to imagine yourself on one of these out-of-the-way plantations. It is near the sea, not a storm-tossed highway for floating cities of men, but a hot, calm solitude where the whale blows, or his enemy, the thresher, leaps against him like a streak of silver flashing up from the

waves. Letters start for England in a dugout, paddled by a fisherman with mighty muscles. He is a marked man here because he is free, and when you see him you will be surprised at the difference freedom makes in a man. At dinner, smooth-shouldered girls stand against the wall, solemnly, for they are in the presence. To them the planter is not a master but a deity, mainly beneficent. The wealth of the earth is his; he brings them food from afar, flour, rice and beans, and the toothsome rotten fish that they love. He gives them gold necklaces in due season, and who can stand against his power? To one accustomed to the relations between master and man here, it is hard to believe how readily and remorselessly neolithic man will obey his master, and how careless he is of the suffering or even the life of a black comrade who is in disgrace.

I spoke of this as an out-of-the-way place. This does not mean a few miles along a good road to a railway station. A planter seven miles away asks us to visit him. With the aid of some twenty-five men, two canoes, a horse, a mule, and staying one night on the way, we accomplish the journey and get there rather sea-sick and a little more than a day late. If this is not a record for seven miles, it is an explanation why the Brussels Act works so slowly.

I have spent two years under the shadow of slavery and know something of what it means, and the awful power it gives the master; but the kindness one found on the plantations in spite of that iniquitous system confirmed one's belief that there are deeper motives ruling conduct than law and the fear of punishment.

After studying slavery for five months in the islands, I went over to Angola to see slaving, and followed the ancient slave route that runs due east from Benguella till I stood by the

banks of the Zambesi, half-way across the continent. It was 1906 when I trudged over the very place where Crawford had written so passionately of the slave caravan. What had sixteen years of the Brussels Act done in these plains? As the export to S. Thomé had increased enormously, slaving was still going on to supply it. Slavers were more careful in my time than when Crawford wrote, but they did not hide all the skeletons and shackles, and in that district I saw heaps of shackles. Now these great blocks of wood with holes for hands or feet, are proof conclusive of slaving, for no free man in Africa ever wore a shackle.

Africa does not change so easily. Everything that counts here, law, progress, civilization, is nothing there. Watch your carriers on those plains, inere black dots, crawling like ants over an earth man does not dominate. Nature permits him to enter her solitudes, that is all. She is pleasant enough when all is well, but she waits like a lurking beast to destroy. A lost path, an hour's reckless wandering after game, and thirst has you by the throat. A thoughtless pause beneath a tree in the storm, and the fire that fills the horizon has ended all your schemes, made you something limp and useless in ragged khaki, something for the ants to be busy with. Later, the hyenas will come to their assistance, and a skull and a few large bones will be left to whiten in the sun. Nobody goes into this region but a few missionaries, engineers, or traders. What little commerce there is, is bound up with slavery. Travel there is too costly, too irksome, too dangerous for sportsmen or globe-trotters. The few scattered Portuguese forts, the only apology for government, are too often the home of intrigue.

Such is the land where the Brussels Act has failed to work.

There are now in the islands a few thousand free laborers from the Cape Verde Islands and Mozambique, but there is still a slave population of about 35,000 Angolans. It illustrates Portuguese methods that though the treatment of these people has been held up to the world as a shame to civilization, no one knows their actual number. I will give one proof, conclusive enough that they are slaves. Part of their wage is by law kept back for a repatriation fund to be paid to them when they return to Angola. Out of 179 repatriated in the second half of 1911, 122 laborers got nothing, though the fund stood at £120,000.

Who but slaves would submit to such treatment?

Kind as are the planters personally, they cannot alter slavery, and the bubble of panegyric So carefully blown by their defenders bursts the moment it is touched by the hard facts of plantation life. At Agua Izé plantation, 185 per 1,000 of adult Angolan laborers died in 1909. Principe is still decimated by sleeping sickness, and I read Portuguese reports of the handto-hand struggle against this awful disease. The doctors complain bitterly of the indifference of the planters to precautionary measures, and the inadequacy of their staff to carry out the work of tracing the trypanosomes in the blood and segregating the infected. Meanwhile the innocent die.

The tone adopted by the apologists would be comical were not human life at stake.

"The hygienic resources and medical attendance, the well-supplied pharma-' cies and comfortable infirmaries established in all the working centres, guarantee from a sanitary point of view the care indispensable for the preservation of health and the nursing of the sick,"

from a recent official report that the island hospitals are a scandal. Some are incredibly bad. Out of fifty-four plantations thirty-five need new hospitals. Here is a description by the Commissioners: "The old hospital is an infected hovel without hygienic conditions, and incapable of being improved." I visited that plantation several times and remember the hospital, and my own depression after seeing it. It is impossible to hope that the new hospitals will be built in the time stipulated in the report. It is equally impossible to say how many hundreds will die on the plantations before they are completed.

With such facts it is absurd to talk of the good treatment of the laborers. The cocoa industry is a growing one. As Mr. Harris points out in his new book, Portuguese Slavery; Britain's Dilemma, which should be read by everyone, the crop last year exceeded two millions sterling in value. With such figures one is not surprised that the planters are pressing forward, and that Senhor Mantero has recently stated that 26,000 more laborers are needed to extend operations and fully develop the islands.

Where is that labor coming from? To answer this all-important question we must go to the people concerned. Our Government may issue White Books and Societies may confer, but it is the planters who are at the helm and who are likely to remain there. I think that their views on the matter are very clear. Steamer after steamer is licensed to import labor from Angola. In a single issue of a Government paper last April, two boats were empowered to bring over 800 laborers. More than this, the planters have recently founded an Emigration Society authorized by law and backed by men to whom the islands have proved to be treasure-houses of wealth.