THE LIBERATION OF SLAVES

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20109, 30 March 1928, Page 6

THE LIBERATION OF SLAVES

JT WILL never be possible to compute the number of slaves

freed by the action of the British Government during the last hundred years, and the incalculable total is still growing. The principle has long been established that to reside on British soil is to be free; and some neighbours of the British. Empire, who were slow' to perceive the possibilities afforded ijy their propinquity, are beginning to take advantage of it. Abysinnians, it seems, are realising in growing numbers that if they can but slip across the frontier into the Sudan they are safe from pursuit, and that, if they have been slaves before, they then automatically become free.

Though the fugitives may arrive in a state of destitution they usually contrive to cultivate and build upon the land which is allocated to them, and before much time has .elapsed they are able to pay taxes. In Northern Burma, among the valleys and mountains near the Tibetan and Chinese borders, a small expedition is even now completing the work of emancipation begun under Sir Harcourt Butler.

It was recently announced from Baluchistan that in the Khalat State a decree had at length been issued prohibiting the sale of menservants and maidservants. It would not, of course, be fair to the slave-owners of Africa to regard them, as necessarily tyrannical or harsh; but it is the task of civilisation to modify their outlook. They and their forbears have for unknown ages regarded their right to own human beings as unchallengeable; the personal right of every man, woman and child to enjoy complete freedom is a new idea to them, and in some places has penetrated to the mind of the slave as slowly as to that of his master.

The w’ork of emancipation has none the less to be steadily carried on, even though remote British officials find that their

application of strange ideals in backward places is generally ’greeted by the dispossessed masters with resentful indignation and by the beneficiaries themselves with more surprise than gratitude.