Finally, before leaving this branch of the subject, it is to be observed that the difficulty of obtaining free labour has occurred elsewhere than in the Portuguese possessions.  It has generally admitted, at all events, of a partial solution if the labourers are well treated and adequately paid.  Portuguese experience points to a similar conclusion.  Mr. Smallbones, writing on September 23, 1912, quotes the report of the manager of the Lobito railway, in which the latter, after stating that he has had no difficulty in obtaining all the labour he has required, adds, “I attribute the facility in obtaining so large a supply of labour, relatively cheaply, to the good food we supply them with, and chiefly to the regularity with which payments in cash are effected, and also to the justice with which they are treated.”

The question of repatriation remains to be treated.  It must, of course, be remembered that repatriation is an act of justice to the men already enslaved, but that, by itself, it does little or nothing towards solving the main difficulties of the slavery problem.  Mr. Wingfield, writing to Sir Edward Grey on August 24, 1912, relates a conversation he had had with Senhor Vasconcellos.  “His Excellency first observed that they were generally subjected to severe criticism in England, and said to be fostering slavery because they did not at once repatriate all natives who had served the term of their original contracts.  Now they were blamed for the misfortunes which resulted from their endeavour to act as England was always suggesting that they should act!” His Excellency made what Parliamentarians would call a good debating point, but the complaint is obviously more specious than real, for what people in England expect is not merely that the slaves should, if they wish it, be repatriated, but that the repatriation should be conducted under reasonably humane conditions.  For the purposes of the present argument it is needless to inquire whether the ghastly story adopted by the Anti-Slavery Society on the strength of a statement in a Portuguese newspaper, but denied by the Portuguese Government, that the corpses of fifty repatriated men who had died of starvation were at one time to be seen lying about in the outskirts of Benguella, be true or false.  Independently of this incident, all the evidence goes to show that Colonel Wyllie is saying no more than the truth when he writes:  “To repatriate, i.e. to dump on the African mainland without previous arrangement for his reception, protection, or safe conduct over his further route, an Angolan or hinterland ‘servical’ who has spent years of his life in San Thome, is not merely to sentence him to death, but to execute that sentence with the shortest possible delay.”  It is against this system that those interested in the subject in England protested.  The Portuguese Government appear now to have recognised the justice of their protests, for they have recently adopted a plan somewhat