Page:Morel-The Black Mans Burden.djvu/174

 been acted, and it has ended happily." I do not altogether agree, for the reasons given further on. The Portuguese planters on the Islands are now directing their efforts to secure labour from Mozambique—Portuguese East Africa. I have never heard it alleged that the Mozambique labour is not free, as free as any contracted labour is. But in view of the particulars which follow, I am beginning to doubt whether it can be.

The blunt truth about the Islands to-day is that they are a palpable death-trap. There is nothing peculiar in the climatic conditions which should make them so. Sleeping sickness which used to prevail in Principe, but not in San Thomé, has been extirpated through the devoted labours of Portuguese medical men. There is nothing in the character of the cultivation itself which can account for the fact. It is, indeed, a healthy, out-of-door, not particularly strenuous occupation, which compares, in many, if not in most respects, very favourably with the growing of other tropical crops. Ill-treatment on the plantations is not the cause, although ill-treatment may, and probably does, occur on some plantations. But the individual Portuguese is not habitually inhuman in his treatment of coloured labour. He is probably in some ways less heavy-handed than the Anglo-Saxon. Nevertheless these Islands are a death-trap, and nothing else. The admitted mortality among the labourers remains what it was before the system of procuring labour on the mainland of Angola was changed. But to-day it is the Mozambique natives who suffer most. A mortality of 10 per cent, among adults in the prime of life is monstrous. Yet that is the admitted death-rate which continues to obtain, according to the official figures supplied by the British Consular staff. The total number of contracted labourers on the Islands, exclusive of the children, varies between 35,000 and 40,000. It is acknowledged that 4,000 deaths occurred among contracted labourers on the Islands in 1915, and even then there is a balance of 4,246 unaccounted for, on the basis of the Portuguese statistics of imported and exported labour for the year. Nor is the tale even then complete. The Portuguese statisticians make separate returns for the children born to contracted labourers. From these returns it appears that between August, 1915, and July, 1916, 519 children were born while the death rate amounted to 643. In other words, the mortality among