A REVOLTING TRADE.

Evening Star, Issue 14036, 17 April 1909, Page 11

A REVOLTING TRADE.

lis the ■ English Illustrated Magazine ’ MiFrank Scudamore, writing on the Soudan slave trade and the harem, makes a very strong appeal to Turkey, to which it is to be hoped the Young Turks will respond: "The providing of this particular form of chattel is a specialty of the slave dealers of Kordofan and Darfur. I refer to the providing of those sexless attendants of the harem who from the earliest recorded periods of history have been considered necessary throughout the East as guardians of their masters’ honor. This is a class of black slave whose abolition should be procured by no matter what means, however drastic. Apart from all other considerations, the mortality among these unfortunates is so stupendous that I have been assured by native slavedealers that not more than .25 per cent, of the youths captured ever reach the harems to which they are destined. I may say that I have known of as many as two thousand of them being in service at .ope palace of the Su’.tan’s in Constantinopla at one time, and that custom still demands the presence of at least one such attendant in the household of Turks of even quite moderate fortune. Turkey can never hope to take her place among the enlightened nations of the world so long as the faintest! vestige remains of this ancient and barbarous -ystem, which has as its basis an admitted suspicion of the virtue of the mothers of her sons.”