power. That remains to be seen. We do not know yet the result of the Peace Conference, but we do know that times out of number most of our leading statesmen and the leading statesmen of the Allies insistently urged that the war was waged for human enfranchisement and the right of every nationality to work for its own desires. Nobody will deny that. We say now that that having been our declaration we are not free to dispose of the future of Africa as though the inhabitants were cattle or sheep. That was the policy adopted at the Congress of Vienna; it was a policy which resulted in disastrous consequences. We submit that if that is the policy to be adopted with regard to Africa the people of Africa will not be contented, happy or prosperous. It is a fallacy to assert that the natives in the transferred territories are incapable of expressing their opinion. As a matter of fact, public opinion in tropical Africa, as Bishop Oluwole will, I am sure, bear me out, is as alive to-day as in any other part of the world. Education is making rapid progress and also intelligence. The natives are expanding to an extent which they never dreamt of a few years ago, and it is quite impossible for us to ignore these changes and to assert that we have the right to dispose of these people as it seems convenient. There is the whole machinery of the tribe; that machinery was considered perfectly adequate thirty or forty years ago when the territories were annexed, and if that machinery was adequate forty years ago why should it not be adequate now? Native opinion must be consulted upon all these points. We have had a warning by what is happening in India and in Egypt. We cannot govern India by Rowlatt Acts, and we cannot govern Egypt by aeroplanes and flying columns. Let our statesmanship be the statesmanship of our aims and declarations during the war.

Mr. H. W. NEVINSON proposed Resolution II :—

"That this meeting protests against the continuance in bondage of nearly 12,000 slaves in Portuguese West Africa and over 150,000 in the late Colony of German East Africa and calls upon His Majesty's Government to take action with a view to securing the complete abolition of the status of slavery and an early emancipation of the slaves."

He said that he could not speak with personal knowledge of slavery in German East Africa, but if that territory were, as was probable, to be handed over to the British Government as Mandatory, there was no doubt that slavery must be abolished at once. It was true that the cost would be great; it would be about as much as the cost of five hours of the recent war!

Turning to the slavery in Portuguese West Africa, Mr. Nevinson said that he owed much to this Society's help and to that of his old friend the late Mr. Fox Bourne, Secretary of the Aborigines Protection Society, who was the first man to read his report of his Mission to the Islands of San

Thomé and Principe. Slavery there was very much what it had been in the sixteenth century when he was in the islands.

The slaves were then brought over from Africa to the number of about 4,000 per year and were never returned; at the end of their five years' contract they were simply taken on again. The death rate was very highviz. in San Thomé 100 per 1,000 per annum, and on Principe 200 per thousand, as compared with the death rate in the British Isles of about 16'2 per thousand. The cause of this high mortality was melancholy, for the African loved his home, and when torn from it he pined away and died very rapidly. This Society put the case before Sir Edward Grey, who took it up with great energy and determination, and a British Consul-General was appointed for Portuguese West Africa. But for the war he thought slavery would have been exterminated altogether. By the beginning of 1917 at least 10,000 of the slaves had been repatriated, entirely owing to the representations of this Society, and Mr. Nevinson added," When we come to die, it will be some comfort to think that we have been instrumental in adding enormously to the happiness of these black men and women.”

Since the war we had had no very definite information. There had been one Report which was full of contradictions and very insufficient. The death rate was still high-100 per 1,000 on San Thomé. Repatriation was so slow that we calculated that there must have been at least 25,000 slaves still left upon the Islands. We hold that all those "old slaves," i.e. the slaves recruited under the old system, should be repatriated, and that the process of re-contracting the slaves should be publicly carried out in the Curator's Office in the capital of San Thomé, instead of up in the plantations where there is nobody to listen and no public opinion, and the whole thing is an absurd farce. Re-contracting should be in public and the British Consul should have the opportunity to be present.

Sir CHARLES TARRING, in seconding the Resolution, said that our position in German East Africa was temporary and therefore the Government were unwilling to take the action which was asked of them. It seemed to him that our Government was altogether unnecessarily scrupulous and hesitating. The Germans would not return to East Africa to govern under former conditions, and it was also quite certain that one of the Articles in the League of Nations which will be included in the Peace Treaty will be the abolition of slavery. Our Government would be perfectly justified in carrying out the principle which has been consecrated by tradition, that where British Power extends there must be no slavery.

The resolution was carried.

Sir SYDNEY OLIVIER moved Resolution III :

"This meeting desires again to urge upon His Majesty's Government

the importance of securing at an early date another International Conference of the Powers for the consideration of problems affecting the welfare of the races in tropical and semi-tropical regions."

He quoted with approval the terms of President Wilson's declaration on the protection of the Natives from exploitation. Our leading statesmen, he said, had tied themselves into knots with secret treaties so that it was now difficult to get out of them and make a plain statement of high principles like that of the President. It was true that the Draft League of Covenant referred to the rights of Natives, but the clauses in it were too indefinite and should be made far more precise. Slave driving and forced labour should be prohibited as well as slave trading. Further, the conditions which were laid down for the territories under a Mandatory must be extended to all the colonies, and there should be a Court of Appeal, so that the Native could appeal direct to his trustees. The Covenant was not sufficiently clear, and they asked for an International Conference which should set up definite and necessary rules, with proper representation of the natives interested.

The Secretary, Mr. Travers Buxton, then read the following message from Sir HARRY JOHNSTON :

"I should like to have attended and to have proposed this resolution. But an April, remarkable, even, in the cruel annals of British weather, has laid me low with a severe chill and I am confined to the house for a week to come. The great mandatory powers more or less entrusted with the governance of the backward peoples cannot much longer joggle along in an unscientific, unreasoned way in carrying out their self-imposed task. We have lately been brought up short by organized Labour refusing to be put off any longer with polite assurances of unproductive sympathy and unfulfilled promises. Similarly, I think you will find, the backward peoples of the world are pressing for an authoritative statement of their position, their rights and the redress of their wrongs; and a revision of their relations with the governing white races. Officialdom would dearly like to postpone the consideration of the problem: not out of ill-will towards the black, yellow and brown peoples, but out of languor, weariness, and dislike of the new education that is necessary for its right solution.

"But such a Conference would do a world of good. It would not only open our eyes as to the extent to which education has spread among the once-backward or even savage peoples, and the aspirations it has aroused; but it would bring home to these races of Africa, Asia, Oceania and Tropical America how much they owe to the oft-times unselfish interference in their concerns of the white man of Europe and North America.”

Rev. C. E. C. LEFROY briefly seconded the resolution.

A member of the audience, Major P. S. Inskipp, speaking as one who had spent many years of his life in Africa, asked permission to put a

few questions to Mr. Harris in regard to Rhodesia. He wished to remove a wrong impression which he thought might have been created in the minds of those present by some of Mr. Harris's remarks. He thought that the Chairman himself had been betrayed into error in stating that the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council had found that the ownership of the unalienated land in Southern Rhodesia was vested in the Crown as Trustee for the native inhabitants; so far as his recollection served him their Lordships stated that whoever owned the land the natives certainly did not. Major Inskipp declared that the natives did enjoy the practical ownership of native reserves amounting to some twenty millions of acres inside which no Europeans were permitted to enter without the consent of the Administrator, which was rarely given except to ministers of the Gospel and Missionaries, and that these reserves could not be in any way interfered with without the sanction of His Majesty's Government.

Sir Victor Buxton remarked that we welcomed fair criticism, and invited Mr. Harris to reply.

Mr. Harris pointed to the fact that the reserves were 85 per cent. granite, in answer to which Major Inskipp explained that the natives were quite unable to cultivate the heavy loams with their primitive implements and that prior to the occupation of the country the vast majority of the natives selected granite soils for their gardens.

Mr. Harris drew attention to the important fact that Major Inskipp, the chief representative of the Commercial department of the Chartered Company in Rhodesia, had not denied the really important part of the statement, namely that the natives of Mashonaland and Matabeleland had lost all their indigenous rights to land.

The third resolution was then put to the meeting and carried unanimously.

Indian Labour in Fiji.

COMMUNICATIONS have been received from the Australian Association for the Protection of Native Races in Sydney, asking for the help of our Society in connection with the condition of the indentured labourers from India in Fiji.

The Association has made efforts to remedy certain grave abuses (some of which have been previously referred to in these pages) and has been in communication with the Government of Fiji as to measures being taken to bring about a better state of things.

It was asked especially that trained matrons should be appointed for four leading hospitals for labourers on sugar plantations, as it was believed that

such appointments would be accepted as an instalment of remedy to grievances and an earnest of a desire to see justice done in other matters.

The Colonial Secretary of Fiji declined to enter into correspondence, but assured the Association that the matter was being attended to.

Our Committee addressed a letter to the India Office to which a reply was received that the matter was in the Colonial Office Department, but that it was believed that some steps had already been taken in the direction desired. Another letter was addressed to the Colonial Office, in reply to which we have been informed that it has been decided that such matrons shall be appointed in accordance with the conditions of indenture, should indentured labour be in use in Fiji' after the War, but that it had not yet been settled whether the system of indenture would be continued.

In later correspondence with the Governor of Fiji, the Association drew his attention to the report of Miss Garnham, a missionary of the London Missionary Society, who was sent out to investigate the conditions of Indian labour, as representative of the Combined Women's Organizations of Australasia. This report, a copy of which has been sent to us, fully confirms the statements made in the formidable indictment drawn up by Mr. C. F. Andrews in the form of a Statutory Declaration last year.

The Governor, Mr. Rodwell, while he held the opinion that Mr. Andrews' reports were extravagant in their language, and cast an unjust slur upon Fiji, has admitted the justice of his criticisms upon the moral condition of the Indian labour lines "which are unfit for occupation by married couples and their families"; upon the need for improving the hospital arrangements and medical treatment generally; upon the neglect of the care and education of the children, and upon the evils due to the disproportion of the sexes among the labourers.

MISS GARNHAM'S REPORT.

After referring to previous inquiries conducted into the system of Indian indentures in Fiji, and the announcement of Lord Hardinge that it would be abolished as soon as practicable (by Nov. 1921 there will be no indentured workers left), the report mentions the abnormally high rate of suicides in Fiji, the number of crimes and other evils, and names as the causes the disproportion of the sexes, the lack of privacy in the coolie lines which leads to loss of self-respect, and the break from the Indian communal village life with its traditional restraints and religious sanctions.

On the condition of the coolie quarters or "lines," which are built according to Government regulations, Miss Garnham writes that anything approaching privacy is impossible in them, and that they are entirely unsuitable for married people.