SLAVERY IN GERMAN EAST AFRICA.
[To THE EDITOR Or THE " SPECTATOR."]
Sin,—Your last issue reprinted the memorial addressed to the Colonial Office by the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society; and supported by various peers, prelates and presidents. The memorializers request the King " to proclaim at an early dote the abolition of the legal status of slavery in the territory which was known as German East Africa." The impulses of humanity which impelled the petitioners to make this request are worthy of all honour; but nevertheless seem to have hurried them into a forgetfulness of three countervailing considerations.
(1) The desired Proclamation would be a breach of Inter- national Law. Great Britain is not in occupation of "German East Africa" as a territorial sovereign, endowed with permanent rights by conquest or cession. She is there only with temporary rights of occupation, as a hitherto successful belligerent in a war still pending. Those rights do not authorize her to effect a vast and practically irrevocable alteration in. the social and legal institutions of the occupied territory; or to annihilate the pro- prietary interests of large numbers of its inhabitants without any financial advantage to herself.
(2) The desired Proclamation would be a •breach of the comity existing between the Allied Powers of the Entente. In the settle- ment of the terms of peace those several Powers will be entitled to protect their respective interests; and the various colonies wrenched from Germany during the war will be amongstthe most important make-weights in the general bargain for such protec- tion. No single member of the Alliance has a right, without the consent of the others, so to disorganize one of those colonies as ,to materially impair its value as a factor in the bargaining.
(3) The desired Proclamation would produce such immediate misery as to frustrate, instead of fulfilling, the humane aspira- tions of its promoters. The noble history of Emancipation affords warnings enough of the abject distress which may ensue if 185,000 slaves of all ages, accustomed to depend upon their masters for all the necessaries of life, are suddenly thrown upon their own resources to shift for themselves. In their penniless condition, starvation, or crime, or employment are the only alternatives before them. Yet where shall wage-paid employment be found for even the adults in a colony where no adequate market for free labour exists as yet, and where their late masters (their most suitable employers) will be embittered against them by the un- compensated confiscation which an invading conqueror has [We regard slavery as so infamous that we cannot admit the validity of any legal arguments for retaining it. In some countries human sacrifice is a "social and legal institution." But a British Army of Occupation would not allow it to continue if it could stop it.—ED. Spectator.]
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