The "General Act" of the Anti-Slavery Conference at Brussels was
published in the Times on Thursday, and will be signed at once. It is for the most part a detailed Code for the guidance of the marine and other officers employed to put down slavery; but it binds all the African Powers to act together, and to treat slave-catching or slave-dealing as penal offences. Slavery itself is still tolerated, but a slave who reaches a European war-ship is ipso facto a free man, and any agent of a European Power may liberate a slave whom he finds on board a ship. A great central office for the suppression of slavery is to be set up in Zanzibar, and the sale of arms to slave-catchers is rigidly prohibited. The Code will serve as a basis of action for those Powers which intend abolition, though it will, we fear, be easily evaded by Powers, like Portugal, which intend nothing of the sort. Still, a formal consensus of Europe has always some effect.
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