PUTUMAYO ATROCITIES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume L, Issue 15325, 11 June 1913, Page 6

PUTUMAYO ATROCITIES.

The report of the British Parliamentary Committee on the Putumayo atrocities cannot be considered satisfactory. A company registered in London and theoretically managed by British directors was a piratical organisation as far as many helpless natives of the Amazonian forests knew it. Thousands of these poor aboriginals were murdered under the most unspeakable conditions. Cruelties and abominations, of which even an outline simply cannot be printed in the public press, were perpetrated on every hand and as ordinary incidents of living by officials of this London rubber company. Had it not been that these officials were foolish enough to import Barbadian negroes as drivers and» to treat these negroes almost as though they were Amazonian aboriginals, these Putumayo horrors might be proceeding to this day. But these negroes were British and the Imperial machinery which evidently does not know anything and does not ask anything of the doings of London companies abroad, moved slowly but surely at the cry of British subjects, even though their skins were black and they were hidden in the remotest corner of the world. No better work of the kind has been done than that accomplished by the Imperial Government and its envoy, Sir Roger Casement, in rescuing its Barbadians and incidentally exposing the monstrous iniquity of this British company's employees. It is time, however, that the laws under which such companies do their business were fundamentally amended. There is imprisonment for the tired enginedriver who wrecks a train by disregarding signals ; but there appears to be no punishment for those whose " culpable negligence" is responsible for the agonising tortures and frightful deaths of tens of thousands of innocent and unoffending aboriginals.