Page:Morel-The Black Mans Burden.djvu/172

 Islands, whence they never returned. An additional cloak of respectability was given to the system after 1903 by the creation of a "Central Committee of Labour and Emigration," with a supervising Board in Africa. The Committee and its Board consisted of officials and planters, that is to say, of the two classes directly affected. Of course, the system went on as before. The truth was known to everyone concerned. Protests by individual Portuguese were never lacking, and were marked in certain instances by rare courage. It is true also that successive Portuguese Cabinets contained individuals who would have stopped the traffic if they could. But after a steady agitation had effected some reforms, nine years after the creation of the "Central Committee," the Minister for Foreign Affairs in the young Portuguese Republic was fain to confess to the British Minister at Lisbon that "the governors whom he had sent out to give effect to its (the Government's) instructions had been to a great extent paralysed by the power of the vested interests" arrayed against them.

The procuring of the slaves was marked by all the features of the old slave-trade. In their march, into the interior, Nevinson and Burtt found the sides of the roads littered with wooden shackles and bleaching bones. At that time the traffic was just recovering from a desperate and ineffectual attempt to throw off the Portuguese yoke on the part of a number of interior tribes.

It seems strange at first sight that public attention in Europe was not directed earlier to the scandal. But it is only within the last twenty years or so that the searchlight of modern inquiry has been able to penetrate the vastness of the African interior, and the individuals who, either by their direct discovery or by an accidental combination of circumstances have learned the truth and ventured to expose the more hideous of the tragedies perpetrated in these remote regions, have invariably found themselves opposed by powerful and unscrupulous vested interests, and by the blocking effects of European diplomacy. With the exception of the Amazonian forests, whose indigenous population—which Roger Casement tried to save as he helped to save the natives of the Congo—is now reduced to vanishing point, tropical Africa is the last stronghold of unfettered capitalism, the last resort of the man-hunter and slave-driver on a large scale. And the latter covers up Iris tracks and disguises his practices with a cunning which