Page:The Annual Register 1899.djvu/41

 1899-] Sla/oery in Zanzibar, [33

Sir E. Reid {Dumfries Burgh) supported his friends by declar- ing it to be unlawful for any British subject to do what was said to have been done on this occasion, and he asserted that this view was in accordance with the declaration of the Attorney- General, Sir R. Webster, in 1897. The Under-Secretary, Mr. Brodrick, admitted that an inquiry was held before a British official. If there had been any cruelty in the case, the persons aggrieved could have claimed manumission. Discussing the question whether slaves should be returned at all, he explained that the statute law forbade the buying or selling of slaves, and that that law was in force on the mainland of East Africa; but the declarations made when Great Britain took over the protectorate of Zanzibar prevented the abolition without com- pensation of the status of slavery. It was then declared that the status of all slaves possessed at the time by the subjects of the Sultan should remain unchanged. Mr. Buxton (Poplar, Tower Hamlets) referred to a despatch from Lord Salisbury to Sir A. Hardinge, in which it was stated that the Attorney-General had laid down that a British subject who took part in re- storing a slave to his master or deprived any person of his liberty on the ground that he was a fugitive slave was breaking the law. The Attorney-General, Sir R. Webster (Isle of Wight), was then forced to defend himself from having ranged himself on the side of the slave-owners. His view of the law, which, he said, had been misunderstood or misrepresented, was that a British subject was prohibited from carrying away or removing a slave or being concerned in such removal. He denied that he had ever laid it down that it was illegal for an official to express an opinion that, according to the law of the country in which he was, a master was entitled to the services of a slave. The slackness of our Government in consistently applying the Emancipation Act in East Africa having been effectually estab- lished, the matter was allowed to be dropped.

No time was lost by the Government in introducing their London Government Bill (Feb. 23), of which the management was left wholly in Mr. Balfour's hands. In introducing the measure, he modestly defined the scope of the bill as one in- tended to complete the edifice of local self-government in the metropolitan area. The organisation of the City of London, with all its charters and privileges, would remain untouched, and the London County Council, established in 1888, would be left to deal with matters in which all parts of the metropolis were alike interested. The new bill proposed to deal exclusively with the Vestries and Administrative Boards, called into exis- tence by the act of 1855. It was therefore proposed to partition these into areas for local self-government, and already sixteen areas were ripe for the creation of municipalities ; and it was hoped that all would be arranged by November, 1899. No area was to be constituted a separate municipality that had not a population above 100,000 or under 400,000 inhabitants, or a

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