Page:What I Know Of The Labour Traffic.djvu/11

9 Nor is this quite the whole of the beautiful story. The dealers in men and women are also agents for numerous trading concerns who carry on a varied commerce in the hateful trash which finds no market that is mentioned in any known Chamber of Commerce but is sold to low bred scoundrels who do peculiar business with the coloured children of men.

That is a dark saying. If you come to understand its full meaning you will be able to appreciate the trouble which I have taken in procuring other facts and details which you have yet to learn.

This is one feature of that injustice which I am laying stark before you; and now, if you please we will read over together the lecture which I delivered at Mackay:

—

What is known as the labour traffic is not to be considered merely as a local institution, but an integral part of that great industrial war, whose field is the world, whose soldiers are the people of all nations and languages, and whose generals and captains are the chief men of the best races of mankind. We have recently been told by a Regius Professor of History, that the object of all the principal bloody wars which immediately preceded the Napoleonic Wars, and ended at Waterloo, was the possession of the New World. Whatever may be thought of this theory, it certainly throws a new light on history, for it draws our attention from the petty ambitions of mere kings to the struggles and throes of humanity. We cease to care for the secrets of courts, and take no interest in the tricks of diplomacy, or the intrigues of politicians, but are brought face to face with man, as the agent who is responsible for the earth not being made a slaughter house, but a garden; not a chess board, on which two or three may plot and play a sanguinary game for their own amusement, but a free highway leading to a more perfect life in which man shall stand not only as the paragon of animals, but the Beauty of the World.

Whether we are satisfied or not with Professor Seeley's solution of his own problem, the New World is ours at this moment—not by bloody war and the conquest of the sword, but by means of gentle peace and the triumphs of industry and commerce. The English race is master of all that Columbus and his companions discovered. The Americas and the Australias have come under the sway of the Anglo-Saxon. The influence of the Latin race, like the influence of the Latin religion, has ceased to rule, much less to over-awe the mind of man. The religion of practical life has taken the place of technical religion; in other words, reality has come into collision with shams and unrealities to the everlasting damage of the shams. "The Bull Dog," "The Lion," "The Defence," The Dragon," and "The Swan," have met the "Immaculate Conception," the "Holy Ghost," the "Holy Cross," the "Virgin without Sin," the "Queen of Heaven," the "Mother of God," and the "Sacred Heart,"