The amendment directed against the second reading of the Uganda
Railway Bill was rejected in the House of Commons on Monday night by a majority of 153 (239 to 86), and the Bill was then read a second time. Mr. Labouchere founded his objection on the inadequacy of the estimates which had been submitted, but both he and Sir Charles Dilke, who seconded the amendment, spoke really against any extension of our Colonial system in East Africa, and Mr. Labouchere even asserted his conviction that the making of the railway would give a great stimulus to the slavery and slave-trade of East Africa instead of tending to their extinction. He thought we should be much better employed in put- ting down slavery in Zanzibar and Mombasa than in making a railway through Equatorial Africa. But if that is desirable, as we heartily agree, it is not lees desirable to push a railway through a country in which effective means of trans- port would put an end to the slave-trade altogether. As Mr. Curzon observed, the railway is not to be constructed by forced labour, and would do more than anything else to put an end to forced labour. Sir William Harcourt spoke against the railway on the ground of the uncertainty of the estimated cost, but he admitted that he had always objected to the pro- ject without any relation to its cost. The House, however, had always approved it, and that was precisely what it did again on Monday night. Civilisation is always more or less costly, but the true question is as to whether the cost is greater than the equivalent gained. Of course the cost of such an enter- prise cannot be accurately predicted, but there is every reason to believe that it will be more than repaid by the development of East Africa.
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