TERRIBLE OLD FACTS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XII, Issue 36, 26 December 1884, Page 18

TERRIBLE OLD FACTS.

Under the caption, « Social Conditions in the Colonies," Edward Bggleston drawß a terrible picture, in the current Century, of the system of white slavery, prevalent in the early days of the country. Labour was then in great demand, and it was supplied by the home country in the most infamous ways :—" Indentured servants, poor children, vagrants, and other gutter sweepings of London were sent to America with men hard pressed by debt or other dire necessity. So insatiable was the colonial market for men that the trade was very lucrative from the start, and monstrous abuses sprung up. English writers in the middle of the seventeenth century express shame at finding their nation reproached by foreigners for this traffic in its own people. • These English,' says a Dutch traveller, ' are villainous people, and would sell their own fathers for servants in the islands.' Men of other nations were sometimes entrapped by English seamen and sold into the English West India Islands, and prisoners captured by privateers in lawful war were run into lonesome places on the American coast and sold into bondage to increase the profit of the captors." The business was speedily discovered to be profitable, and even the highest officials did not scruple to turn a penny by selling their fellow-countrymen into slavery, lac ladies of the Queen's bedchamber, and the Queen of James the Second herself, took profits for the sale of Monmouth's rebels. Even pacific William Perm begged for twenty of them for the Philadelphia rcarket. Bristol was the great exporting centre of the traffic, mayor aldermen, and law officials conspiring to aid the accursed trade and share in its profits. The essayist does not specially allude to the thousands of Irish boys and girls sold into slavery by Cromwell and bis myrmidons. The world will never know, until the books are opened on Judgment Day, the full history of that awful crime against a nation and against civilisation. Naturally, the bondsmen condemned for a term of years were treated with even less humanity than fell to the lot of the black .life-slave. They were worked and starved to death by the hundreds. There is one gleam of grim humour in the dark story, being the account of how " a little Irishman " outwitted his master. The latter set out with a drove of fifty or more slaves for the interior settlement*, where the " soul-driver,'" as such speculators were called, expected ,'a good price for his gang. But "the little Irishman " contrived to be the last on hand, and, by rising early one morning and passing himself off on the consignee as the master, sold the soul-driver and escaped. There was savage humour, 100, in Franklin's proposition to send^ a present of rattle-snakes for the King's garden, as a fit return for the convicts out of English gaols. England no longer sells her paupers and criminals to America. She has grown more generous, and gives them to us now. Sweet Mother England \— Pilot.