THE DEBATE ON THE SLAVE-TRADE.
IT is hard to say whether the debate on the Slave-Trade gives more of pleasure or pain. Some pleasure it certainly gives. The suppression of the slave-trade is the one really disinterested enterprise that England has taken in hand. It has cost her money and lives ; it has exposed her to the contemptuous wonder, and occasionally the posi- tive ill-will, of other nations ; and it has brought her nothing in return beyond the satisfaction of having honestly tried to lessen the sum of human misery. That is a record to which, in days when national unselfishness has gone out of fashion, one may well turn with pride. And this pride is the more justifiable because the debate of Tuesday showed no sign of any wavering in the popular attitude. The democratic Parliament is, to all appearance, as anxious to put down the slave-trade as the middle-class Parliament which it has superseded. That is a noteworthy fact in a democratic Parliament, because for the moment the tendency of the English democracy is ordinarily selfish and unheroic. Its view of national duty gives a high place to that virtue so much esteemed by the poor in their own social conduct,:--the habit of • " keeping themselves to themselves." Non-intervention has lost its old sense of a refusal to take any part in quarrels between subjects and their rulers, and has conic to mean a refusal to concern ourselves with any foreign question whatever. No object beyond our own shores seems worth striving for, however great may be the benefit its attainment would confer upon others. We are not sure that this disposition will be permanent. It may have its origin in the distrust the democracy feel of subjects of which they know nothing, and in the absence of any guidance of the heroic kind from leaders whom they trust. Probably it is due in part to the exhortations of the great man we have just lost. Mr. Bright seldom or never took positive interest in any foreign question, except the American Civil War, and on that all he had to do was to preach abstention. On every other point his vision, and the vision of his school, was singularly restricted. Already there are symptoms of a change in those he so long led. An Imperial feeling, in the best sense of the term, is dawning among English working men, and questions of National and Colonial defence are coming home to some of them with a vividness which may hereafter exert an important influence on English politics. But as yet this change only affects their self-interest. It promises to make them more enlightened upon questions that directly touch their own persons and pockets. We doubt if they would commission a squadron or mobilise an army corps if to do so would be to liberate every Eastern Christian from Turkish oppression. It is a real satisfaction, therefore, to find that in the debate on the slave-trade, no one was found to hint that its suppression is no business of ours.
So much for the pleasure the debate gives us. When we turn to the pain, it is summed up in the sense that so little comes of our solitary excursion into the region of national unselfishness. We go on talking of putting down the slave-trade, and, according to our lights, really trying to put it down ; but the slave-trade goes on, we will not say unscotched, but certainly not killed. We are not speaking of those aspects of the traffic which we do not attempt to deal with. We are not thinking of the internal slave-trade which will apparently continue so long as the status of slavery is recognised by municipal law, or of the opportunities of limiting that recognition which a more decided policy in Egypt might have put into our hands. When we say that the slave-trade is at most scotched by all we have done, we mean the slave- trade on the high seas, the slave-trade that we profess to control by our ships. There are two reasons why we fail under this head. One is our old and familiar friend, injudicious economy. We can bring ourselves to spend money, but not to spend quite enough. There is only one item in the account that we disallow ; but then, that one is the last pennyworth of tar for want of which much of our previous outlay goes for nothing. It seems extraordinary to hear that one reason why the slave-trade is not suppressed is that a certain proportion of the dhows sail faster than our gunboats. With all the resources of engineering at our command, we do not place on our African stations those swift steamers from whose pursuit there would be no escape. The second reason for the partial failure of our efforts is the action of the French Government. Other Christian nations allow mutual rights of search and capture. No matter what flag a vessel may fly, an English Captain can stop her if he suspects that she has a cargo of slaves on board, and can seize her if he finds that his suspicion is well founded. France is the only exception to this rule. She does not maintain a naval force adequate to suppress the slave-trade carried on under French colours, and she will not allow English vessels to do the work for her. The consequence is that, as Sir James Fergusson put it on Tuesday, " one of the great hindrances to the proceedings of the German and the British naval officers on the East Coast of Africa has been the prevalence of vessels flying the French flag. They have only to display their papers to secure immunity from capture, and slaves have been landed in the island of Pemba within sight of the British and German cruisers." It is not, of course, the French Government that is the author of this abuse. At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs there is no traffic in licences to slavers. But among the subordinates, the Consular agents abroad, there are naturally some who are not above making money by the sale of these convenient immunities. It is worth the slave-traders' while to bribe highly, and the members of an African Consular Service are not always of the stuff that makes men proof against bribery when it is done on a sufficiently liberal scale.
Mr. Buxton's motion would have pledged the Govern- ment to call together a Conference of the European Powers for the concert of measures for the repression of this hateful traffic. Sir James Fergusson showed good reason for alter- ing this into a request that the Government would take steps to ascertain the mind of the Powers on the subject. A Conference is useless, unless the possibility of attaining the end in view has been pretty well ascertained before- hand. To sound the Powers, is really a polite phrase for sounding one of the Powers. We are willing and able to suppress the slave-trade by sea—though at times, perhaps, the work might be done with a little more spirit—pro- vided that no obstacles are thrown in our way, and all the Powers but France are willing to let us do it. If France would only allow the right of search and capture which is allowed by every other Power, the only obstacle that has been thrown in our way would be removed. What we have to do, therefore, in order to make a Conference fruitful, is to insure that France shall enter it with a disposition to assimilate her practice to that of other civilised nations. It is not likely that a Conference will have this result by reason of any argu- ments used in the course of it. On the contrary, any public attempt to make France surrender the immunity which her flag now confers would probably end in defeat. Sharp words would be exchanged between the plenipotentiaries, and the end would be that the self- interest of certain French agents would be reinforced by the national pride of the French people. The real triumph for English diplomacy would be to persuade the French Government that its honour is involved in the prevention of the abuses to which the refusal of the right of search and capture gives rise, and so to incline it to treat the Conference as simply supplying an occasion on which to publish to the world a decision previously arrived at. It is quite possible, too, that the present moment would be badly chosen for such a Conference, and that it would be better to wait until the interests of Germany are less involved in what is going on in Eastern Africa. When England resumes her exceptional position in the matter, Frenchmen may be less inclined than they are now to see a slight in the suggestion that they should give us what no one else has refused. Mean- - while, the more perfect we make our own arrangements for suppressing the traffic, the more exclusive and un- mistakable will be the responsibility of France for its continuance. It is difficult to believe that when this responsibility is brought home to the French Government, they will hesitate to divest themselves of a burden which does them so little credit.
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