SLAVERY

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIII, Issue 254, 23 September 1933, Page 3

SLAVERY

J' 5,000,000 STILL IN BONDAGE. The Governor-General of Australia if (Sir Isaac Isaacs), speaking recently in the Sydney Town Hall at the celebration of the centenary of the British emancipation of slaves, said that the work begun in 1772 by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, and the Judges who followed him, had set in motion a public sentiment that had emancipated many millions of fellow creatures, and was now going forward with success to free the five or six million people who were still held in bondage. Wherever slavery existed to-day—-and it did so in many forms and under very strange camouflage—it flourished only under debased standards of human values, morality, and spiritual truths. The foundation upon which it rested was the asserted natural right of the

strong to subjugate the weak, and its almost invariable indicia were the whip in the hand of the superior, the torture and torment, physical and mental, of the victim, and the deprivation of all kinds of property, including property in himself. The final extinction of slavery would yet come by the driving force and the irresistible contagion of the British national conscience.

Sir Isaac Isaacs said that the first effective stroke at the inherent vice of slavery, a stroke that won the first battle in the as yet unfinished campaign, was dealt in a British Court of justice, when Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, in 1772, granted an application of habeas corpus, promoted hv Granville Sharp, to free a negro named Somerset, who was lying in irons in a ship. Lord Chief Justice Mansfield < based his judgment on the sure and simple, but eloquent, principle that slavery was necessarily repugnant to the common law of England, which meant the common conscience of the nation.