Chilvalry and Statistics

LADY SIMON'S book is dedicated to ",Amanda of Tennessee, and to all those who have suffered and still suffer in slavery." At a modest computation four million human beings are still suffering in slavery : four million human beings still endure degradation, suffer the horrors of the slave-gang, emas- culation, flogging, torture and lingering death ; four million human beings, knowing neither home nor family, work under

the whip in a revolting and tyrannical service worse than death. Four million human beings are held in bondage—with cattle for their yoke-fellows—longing for the'. anaesthesia of death.

Human flesh is still bartered daily ; daily villages are raided and burnt in the name of this ghoulish traffic, boys are dragged away to the yoke, girls to the slave-market and the brothel. And yet slavery was abolished in 1834.

To the gallery of emancipators should be added the name of Kathleen Simon. The world has been drugged into moral insensibility ; the blessed word " abolition " has acted -like a spiritual sedative. Words and slogans are the curse of our generation : they are clothed with omnipotence, credited with a divine infallibility. Althost one is tempted to add " and it

was so." Abolition was hailed as an end, not as an inspiration. A requiescat, and the public conscience, tired after its momen- tary ecstasy, succumbed to the lethargy of reaction. The distant battlefield found no echo in our hearts : the cry of the tortured slave was silenced by the vocabulary of achieve- ment. Now, sharp and insistent, Lady Simon has sounded a new rallying call : her trumpet has pierced our indolence ; we are bidden to arms under the banner of Wilberforce we are summoned to a new crusade. Dare we disobey ?

Let such as are sluggish, such as have no bowels of mercy, such as-are craven, such as have not the will to obey, read Lady Simon's. book. This will surely convince them that

civilization has need of them. It is a book which should be translated into all the languages of the world ; it should find currency in all countries of the world ; it should be read and knOwn wherever there are men of good will.

" The modern problem is not national but international. The new task is not to convince enlightened men and women that slavery is a monstrous and hideous thing, but that it still prevails over large portions of the earth, and that it can be swept away by the leadership and the pressure of the League of Nations. And in pursuing this new crusade, there is ono feature of the situation which gives special grounds for hope: It is the immensely increased sensitiveness of each part of the world to what is going on elsewhere."

Sir John Simon, from whose preface these words are taken, gives the key to the book. Modern conscience is no longer callous ; it does not have to be convinced that slavery is an evil : it is readily shocked by inhumanity. But it does want to know what all the fuss is about. This is a statistical age, not an age of enthusiasm. Chivalry and statistics are queer bedfellows, but perhaps the mating is none the worse for that. There is nothing more relentless than logic, and it is a relentless determination -which is required for our crusade rather than a fiery, but too transient, emotion.

This was well known to the Maharaja of Nepal, who (as we may read in Lady Simon's book), when he abolished slavery in his country, appealed not so much to sentiment, as to economic facts. This is what the Maharaja had to say in a speech which is one of the great ethics of emancipation :

" The slave must be fed and clothed whether he works ill or well, he must be nursed in illness, and at death or desertion his value will have to be written off as a loss. The slave will require more constant supervision than the free labourer, because, sure of a bellyfull whether he works or -not, he will 'naturally prefer to do the least possible ; you.csinziotsterve him, because his physical weakness will be your loss. The superiority of free labour is not a matter of mere speculation. History has proved it and I doubt not that _the experience of those who have occasion ,to use both descriptions of labour in this country will bear out the fact."

This gets to the root of the problem. The question inevitably rises after this book has been read—how is it to be done ? How are Abyssinia, China, Arabia, Liberia and all the other countries which Lady Simon hia passed in survey to be scoured clean of slavery.? The compulsion of war is not

possible : this must be a crusade of persuasion and education. Just as the enlightened Maharaja of Nepal was able to carry hirUby the lagieof etonowtic facts, so; and only

so, will the rest of the dark places of the earth be made white A moral appeal would be doomed to failure : for, as Lady Simon points out, slavery is often a moral and religious obligation. Economic education will succeed when morality and humanitarianism have no possibility of success. It must be demonstrated that slavery does not pay. The conditions which • make slavery possible must be attacked, rather than slavery itself. Only in this way will the Mui Tsai system, for example, be brought to an end. If there is a readjustment of the economic and social conditions to which Mui Tsai is the response, if the people can be taught that these conditions are not only morally outrageous but economically preposterous, . then there will soon be an end of the question. The abolition of slave-owning must precede the abolition of slave-dealing. The slave-traders, ghouls as they are, are only a symptom of economic Malaise and it is that with which we have to deal.

Lady Simon's book, therefore, serves two functions, or, rather, it is educative in two senses. It teaches us just where slavery still exists and just what forms it takes ; it awakens us to our moral responsibilities as the inheritors of a great tradition. But it has also a message for those communities which still practise slavery.

In points of detail there may be minor disagreement. We cannot concur, for example,with the generalization that economic backwardness suggests the presence of slavery. We might remark that, though primitiire man is free to grow coffee, he is not free to do so under British rule in Kenya. More emphasis might have been laid on the economic-necessity by which Abyssinian governors are driven to ivory and slave dealing, because they have no regular salary attached to their posts. And we presume that it was only diplomatic reticence, which permitted no more precise statement con- cerning the slave routes out of Abyssinia. Many observers believe, too, that forced labour makes a pseudo-slavery worse than slavery itself in its effects, and greater space might have been devoted- tO this aspect of the question. - All these, hmyeter, are points of detail and do not materially affect the value of this startling book.. There are few books of which it may be said that everyone should read them. This is a book which everyone must read, to whom hUManity is something more than a name and who is prepared to take up arms against the most hideous perversion in the history of civilization.

Dr. Moton's book comes aptly to the occasion. There are few new facts in it bearing on black and white relations in America. But he has done a great service both to black and white culture in giving us the psychological aspect of this contact. He emphasizes the fact that for the slave there was virtually no home, and he explains what has been the reaction of the negro to his slave environment, which incidentally still persists. He makes a good point in proving that there is an increasingly large percentage of negroes who have no inti- mate contact with whites, and shows - cOnclusively that whereas the white_ man has little opportunity to penetrate the reserve of the negro, his " defence mechanism " as he calls it, the negro has, at any rate, been admitted in a servile capacity to all the intimacies of a white household. When the white man, therefore, says that he knows the negro, he only means that he knows how to get the most work out of him. The negro on the other hand knows a great deal more about the white and finds an ironical amusement in the white's assumption of knowledge. He also has understanding. " After all," he reflects, " it may be a harder thing to be a white man and constantly live up to one's standards in the face of hostile public sentiment than to 1re a black mart and 'submit with patience to the injustice and abuse in the hope of ultimate relief-and vindication."