Page:Morel-The Black Mans Burden.djvu/173

 increases as the means of investigation become perfected. Even the methods of a Leopold II. are beginning to be out of date. More subtle means are now required. But the end in view has suffered no alteration. Carefully planned legislation, combining land expropriation with taxation, can bring about the desired results—a cheap and plentiful supply of black labour—if a little more slowly, as surely and far more scientifically than the old system.

The procuring of the Angolan slaves for the "Cocoa Islands" was one thing. Their treatment in the plantations was a distinct problem of its own. Owing to the circumstances already narrated, public opinion became concentrated almost entirely upon conditions in the Islands. Conditions in the mainland plantations have really never been investigated at all. These produce no cocoa.

It would be tedious to narrate the peripatetics of a long campaign to secure fundamental reforms in the recruiting of labour on the mainland, and the improvement in the treatment of the labourers on the Islands, which appears to vary a good deal according to whether the plantations are well or ill managed.

The position at present appears to be this. The labour which finds its way to the Islands is no longer slave labour. There can, I think, be no longer any real doubt on that point. One thing at least is certain: Repatriation, which never occurred before, is now regular, although whether efficient agencies exist on the mainland for seeing the repatriated labourers back to their homes is another matter. Anyway, the Angolan who goes to San Thomé returns to the mainland at the expiration of his contract, unless he dies on the Islands in the interval. Men from Angola are now returning as fast as they are going in. In the two years, 1914–15, 5,732 Angolans entered San Thomé, and 6,842 left it. In the first half of 1916, 2,703 entered, and 1,994 left. This implies, of course, a revolutionary change. Previously some 4,000 Angolans were drafted into San Thomé annually. They never left it. It swallowed them up. As M. Auguste Chevalier put it a few years ago: "There is a door by which to enter San Thomé; there is none by which to leave." Mr. Joseph Burtt now feels moved to write: "A great human drama has