THE BLACK QUESTION.
rORD SALISBURY must make up his mind, and I that quickly, as to what be will do in the Black question. The facts are coming on and when they have once filtered into the British mind, he will .find that the electors will become restless, and will insist on action, which, if the Government is not ready, will probably be unwise.. The matter is not one which only concerns philanthropists, or that exceedingly limited class which acknowledges no distinctions of colour, race, or capacity for self-government. The average British voter holds, as we do, that the gradations of capacity among human beings are almost infinite, but that no human, being is entitled to hold. slaves or to torture other human beings for gain, and that within the British dominion such practices ought not to be tolerated under any excuses whatever. Moreover, he holds himself bound, if it is _physically possible, to prevent atrocities being committed by Christians anywhere ; or if he cannot prevent them, to. protest in such a way as to move the opinion of the civilised world. Two stories are told this. week which; at all events, appear to be true, and. which, if true, demand the immediate interference of the Foreign Office. The one closest to us is the story of the. slaves in Zanzibar. It is stated, on authority which cannot be ques- tioned, that there are a, hundred and forty thousand slaves in Zanzibar and Pemba, that is, in a dominion which is as much ours as Guiana or Jatnaica, of whom all but five per cent. are captives, men and women stolen from their homes by Arab raiders, and sold. to the planters and employers of the two islands. These British subjects are held in true slavery, forced to work by savage discipline, imprisoned in British prisons if they run away, sold from planter to planter, and transferred from island to island under permits which are as_much. British as. if Lord Salisbury had signed. them. If they belong to citizens of the towns their employers steal half their wages, if to planters in the country they steal all, giving nothing in return for labour, but bare food. In Zanzibar the slaves have right of appeal againstcruelty, which, says, Mr. Mackenzie, who saw it all: on the spot, they are too ignorant and too timid to ruse ; but in Pemba there is no limit whatever on the masters' authority. They can inflict even death. This system is supported by capital &bin India, and by the opiniou of-raoat officials on the spot—not all, thank God—and is practically defended by British gunboats, and is the worst, officially proved. instance we have ever come across of British hypocrisy. We. are always declaring that we are hostile to slavery, that no slave can breathe under the British flag ; we keep up a whole squadron to.put down slavery on the African coast, and then the very moment it is convenient or profit- able we not only tolerate but actually help to promote the offence which in Parliament we declare to be equal to piracy. It is intolerable, and we do not believe that if the question is once raised in the House of Commons the situation will be endured for an hour. Unionists are not accomplices of slave-holders any more than Liberals, or more disposed to use the irresistible strength of Britain to keep up that concentration of all the villainies. The,Foreign Office, which still rules in Zanzibar, should act before the meeting of Parliament, and inform all officials under its orders that slavery as a legal status must cease at once, that no Court can recognise the condition, that no gaoler can hold a prisoner charged only with escaping, that no tribunal can refuse a claim for redress against assault/1r robbery, of wages simply because the plaintiff is a slave. That decree once promulgated will end the system at once, as it did in India, Its advocates say the slaves lore slavery, and, of course, if they think so, they have no right of protest, for a much-loved system does not need the support of the lash, the chain, or the priscm. If the slaves are contentwith the robbery, of their wages, which, ia,the sole' motive of slavery; So .be it, they can work if they please for nothing; but it is not our business to see that when they work they shall receive only food. As for the economic disturbance which the decree will produce, we simply disbelieve in it ; and as to the danger of insur- rection, we reply that the slaves are half the population, and every man of them would be on the side of the emancipating Government. As to --compensation, we are willing, if it be necessary, to' vote. any moderate sum in order to avoid social trouble ; but of moral claim the Arab planters have simply none whatever. They stole the slaves, or bought them against British law from the stealers.: .These difficulties are alwaya, raised by those who at heart either approve slavery, . or think it essential to profit, and they always vanish when the final order has gone forth, and has reached the ears of the emancipated population. Kveni,xprazil society has not been overturned by emancipatwo, nor has cultivation ended or seriously decreased., The other story is of a different kind. The ;evidence is fast accumulating that the Government of theicango Free State is a new instance of what Mr. Gladstone once styled "the negation of God erected into a system." It is impossible to doubt any longer that the greed of gain which in India once induced British officials to regrate corn i a a famine, and so make fortunes at the price of massacre, has broken out among the servants of King Leopold. They are probably unpaid, or half- paid, as our own men were in India. ; they are diunk at once with power and with the misery which Europeans!. , ,feel in tropical ,Africa,—a Inisery which gets to the head—and they try to make fortunes in the,only way open to them by creating monopolies. An officer orders a district to send in ivory or indiarubber at half the traders' prices. The blacks refuse, and the officer lets loose his savage black soldiers with orders to compel them to obey. There is a skirmish, a defeat, and a massacre, and the soldiers return to their employer victorious, with, it is positively asserted by white witnesses of good character, "baskets of human hands, often including those of children." Let us do no injustice even to such men. The hands have probably not been cut from living beings, but are chopped from the dead to prove, as the Persian soldiers, within living memory, proved by their trays heaped with eyes, that the soldiers' work has been honestly done. The country thus ravaged is becoming deserted, the villagers flying to the French Congo, where they are perhaps severely taxed, but where they are not plundered and not massacred in heaps if they will not sub- mit to the plunder. It seems to us that it is the duty of our Foreign Office, overburdened though it may be, to inquire, through its many agents in Uganda, on the Lakes, and in the Congo Valley itself, into the truth of these stories, to receive information from the Missionary societies, and if it finds the statements true, to intervene with a very strong hand. It is not our territory ? Neither is Armenia ; but we are as responsible for the agreement on which the Congo State is built, as for the Treaty of Berlin. We helped to create what is, we fear, a most oppressive Government, and we are responsible up to the limit of our power of prevention for these oppressions. As to our power, there is no serious doubt. We can, if we please, hand over the Congo State to the French. The Germans will be delighted that they should have such occupation, the Russians will not oppose their allies, and the Italians care nothing about the matter. Kin g Leopold should be told, if the case is proved, that his experiment has failed, that his strength is obviously unequal to the burden, that in the general interest of humanity, the task must be handed over to a stronger Power, and that this Power can only be France.
We are a little afraid of tiring our readers with the Black question, but it is with us matter not only of political interest but of personal conscience. We have strenuously defended the conquest of Africa by Europe—it is con- quest, whatever pretty words we may use—as essential to the development of the world, including its black races, and it is most galling to see the conquest so misused. We are taking their savage liberty away from these people, and replacing it by what is in too many instances systematic torture for gain. They must be coerced into order, of course, in their own interest, and they must be taxed until they acquire the habit of work to pay the State dues ; but there the right of compulsion by the sword ought in all decency to end. To destroy them in heaps by massacre for private gain is one of the most monstrous crimes conceivable,—one which terminates at once the moral claim of any race that permits it to share in the partition of Africa. And there seems to us something of hypocrisy, as well as laxity, in interfering so strongly when nearly white men are tortured in Armenia, while suffering callously on the Congo scenes which even Turkish Psalms would sedulously conceal from European eyes.
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