SLAVERY L. MODERN SCOTLAND.

Otago Witness, Issue 2356, 20 April 1899, Page 56

SLAVERY L. MODERN SCOTLAND.

This is the title of a paper in the Edinburgh Review which will doubtless occasion no small surprise. It will be news to most people that slavery existed in Scotland until exactly 100 years ago. Still greater

astonishment will be experienced on learning that this was not the survival of the ancient serfdom, but was the work of the Protestant Reformation. The old serfdom disappeared from Scotland sooner than it did from the other countries of Europe. There is positive evidence that colliers were legally free as late as the year 1605 :— " In July, 1606, a short act passed which with one hand stripped salters, colliers, and coalbearers of their natural right to leave their present employment without their employers' permission, and with the other aupthorised the masters of collieries and saltpans to apprehend vagrants and hold them in permanent slavery in their works." The first Scottish Poor* Law in 1579 had adopted, the principle of compulsory servitude to a private owner as a remedy for vagrancy, and the principle of perpetual servitude was adopted in 1597. Strange outcome, truly, of the glorious Reformation — that labourers hitherto free were turned into slaves, and that the odious function of enslaving freemen should be made over to the Presbyterian Kirk Sessions ! — " Here, then, 30 years after the Reformation, we see perhaps a tenth of the inhabitants of Scotland — for vagrants were then unusually numerous— made legally reducible to perpetual slavery, and about 600 little ecclesiastical courts — no more had yet been erected — engaged in the task of reducing them."

The right given to coal masters and masters of metal mines of enslaving tramps was given to all othei employers in 1621. No distinction was made between the honest workman out of a job and the persistent idler : — " Slavery for the vagrant continued to be the favourite and most trusted remedy for vagrancy, and when in 1698 that notable champion of public liberty, Andrew Fletcher, of Saltoun, contemplated the lamentable increase of mendicancy in his native land, and estimated there were 200,000 beggars then wandering wild over it, his cry is still ' for slavery, and more slavery. For he proposes not only to compel the 200,000 vagrants to serve the other inhabitants as slaves ; but, with the violence natural to his character, he proposes to compel the other inhabitants to take the 200.000 vagrants into their service as slaves, every man to take a number proportioned to the size of his estate. Compulsory slavery must needs be reinforced "by compulsory slaveowning."

This unexpected indifference to individual liberty shown by the social legislation of the Puritan party in Scotland is set in curious contrast with the social legislation south of the Border : — " The last of the Crown serfs were emancipated by Elizabeth in 1574, on the express ground — to quote the" statute— that ' it was acceptable to Almighty God, who in the beginning hath made all mankind free.' Tho Statute of Labourers, which for 200 years stripped the English labourer of his freedom to move from place to place in search of better conditions of employment, was repealed under Elizabeth and James I. And although the principle of slavery for the vagrant was introduced into an English statute in 1547, it was deleted two years afterwards."

The writer finds explanation in the ascendency of the Barons, then more powerful in Scotch politics than ever before, and bent on making the dependence of the dmjendenfc class as complete as posssible, ■smo. An the stern ideals of the Protestant Reformers, the slavery of vagrants being only a part of their, ethical purpose carried to an extreme. The Reformation which had greatly swelled the number of the vagrants, was now turned to forcing them into work. Scotch slavery aimed at curing vagrancy by compulsory work. It is a somewhat sardonic sequel to find that slavery, when- abolished by Act of Parliament in 1775, was abolished, not for the relief of the slaves, but for the relief of their owners. Slavery had made coalpelled the coal owners to offer any wages up to a high figure, and the new industries creating a heavy demand for coal compelled the coal owners to offe rany wages for labour. Strange to say, the Act of Emancipation did not increase at once the supply of colliery labour or reduce its wages. The freed colliers fled" from the mines, took work at half their former wages, and men of other trades refused to enter the tainted industry, even when offered double their current wages. The whole article draws attention to a very instructive and evidently all but forgotten chapter in Scottish industry.