ority of cases, expatriated either against their will or without
really understanding what they were doing. Why should they pay for
repatriation? The responsibility of the Portuguese does not end when the
men have been paid their wages and are set free. Neither can it be for
one moment admitted that that responsibility is limited, as the
Governor-General would appear to maintain in a Memorandum communicated
to Mr. Smallbones on October 25, 1912, merely to seeing that repatriated
slaves disembarked on the mainland "shall be protected against the
effects of the change of climate, and principally against themselves."
No one will expect the Portuguese Government to perform the impossible,
but it is clear that, unless the institution of slavery itself is
considered justifiable, the slaves have a right to be placed by the
Portuguese Government and nation in precisely the same position as they
would have occupied had they never been led into slavery. Apart from the
impossibility, it may, on several grounds, be undesirable to seek to
attain this ideal, but that is no reason why the validity of the moral
claim should not be recognised. In many cases it is abundantly clear
that to speak of a slave liberated at San Thome being really a free man
in the sense in which that word is generally understood, is merely an
abuse of terms. The only freedom he possesses is that created for him by
his employers. It consists of being able to wander aimlessly about the
African mainland at the imminent risk of starvation, or of being robbed
of whatever miserable pittance may have been served out to him. For
these reasons it is maintained that the starting-point for any further
discussion on this question is that the plea that slavery no longer
exists in the West African dominions of Portugal is altogether
untenable. It still exists, though under another name. There remains the
question of how its existence can be terminated.

The writer of the present article would be the last to underrate the
enormous practical difficulties to be encountered in dealing
effectively with this question. His own experience in cognate matters
enables him in some degree to recognise the nature of those
difficulties. When the _corvee_ system was abolished in Egypt, the
question which really confronted the Government of that country was how
the whole of a very backward population, the vast majority of whom had
for centuries been in reality, though not nominally, slaves,