and Magazine of the Ceylon Agricultural Society. 



373 



MR. NEVINSON '8 ACCUSATION. 



Shortly after my arrival at St. Thome I called 

 on the Governor of the Colony, Senhor Vieyra 

 de Fonseca, a naval officer of long service on 

 the African coast, with a distinguished record 

 of civil work in addition. We discussed the 

 paragraph containing Mr. Nevinson's accusa- 

 tion, and he gave me full permission, when 

 writing to The Times on the subject, to contra- 

 dict the story on his authority, using his name. 

 Never in modern times had any indentured 

 labourer been landed in irons at this port, nor 

 had anything resembling a sale of slaves by auc- 

 tion taken place. Outside Government House I 

 made further enquiries, but the nearest approach 

 to a clue I got was from one of the principal 

 shipping agents in the town, who told me that a 

 Scotch Engineer — easily identifiable, but whose 

 name he could not then give me — employed on 

 board a vessel recently in harbour, had been 

 boasting that, to " draw I! his friend Nevinson 

 and test the limits of his credulity, he had com- 

 posed the story out of his own head and posted 

 it from St. Thome. The story contained much 

 more harrowing details, ears cut off and a variety 

 of mutilations, but these seem to have been 

 rejected as a bit too strong for the public to 

 accept. Let us hope that this is the explanation, 

 and that jokes of this kind will not be repea- 

 ted, for they do a lot of harm before they can 

 be exposed. 



"a modern slavery." 



I only know Mr Nevinson through his writings 

 and his speeches to the seditionists of India, 

 made during his tour in that country a couple 

 of years ago. These in themselves write him 

 down a luminary of that school of thought (or 

 rather of thoughtlessness) that for want of a 

 better name one might style the Neo- Anarchist 

 school, a sect comprising our Keir Hardies, our 

 Rutherfords, and several more of the same 

 kidney whom I need not mention. Kind- 

 hearted mild-mannered men in private life, 

 who neither handle high explosives themselves, 

 nor actually counsel others to do so, but who 

 expound a doctrine -the practical expression of 

 which is the bomb and the revolver. " Anar- 

 chist," in fact, is what Mr Nevinson in his 

 interesting but somewhat misguided and too 

 often malicious book "A Modern Slavery" 

 claims himself to be ; so he can hardly quarrel 

 with the designation. Should he challenge it, 

 here are a few samples of his creed: — 



'* England can no longer be regarded as the champion 

 of liberty or justice among mankind . . .If she spoke of 

 liberty, the nations would listen with a polished smile 

 (Modern Slavery, 1906, p. 208)." 



Rebelliou is always good. It always implies an un- 

 endurable wrong It is the only shock that ever stirs the 

 self-complacency of officials (Op. Cit., p. il5)." 



" This " (apropos the Spanish Government sending back 

 3ome servicaes to Principe from Fernando Po) "is one of 

 the things which makes us all anarchists wherever 

 you touch Government, you seem to touch the devil (p. 201).' 



"Slavery is not a matter of discomfort or ill-treatment, 

 but of loss of liberty, .it might be better for mankind that 

 the islands should get back to wilderness than that a single 

 ' slave 'should toil there " (p.2i0). 



Teachings of this order simply 



REDUCE HUMANENESS TO AN ABSURDITV, 



The so-called "slave," i.e. the indentured 

 labourer, works for a wage and is paid in 

 food and clothing as well as— gets, in fact, 

 better terms in St. Thome' and Principe than 

 —he does in Ceylon and Burma; and the 



planter has a right to look to Government 

 or to the tribunals to support him in his claim 

 that the labourer shall fulfil his part of the 

 contract as faithfully as the planter does his. 

 In India or Burma, and I presume in Ceylon 

 as well, though I have not here access to any 

 Ceylon legislation, a labourer under an advance 

 who runs away without working it out can be 

 by law, and constantly is, captured on a warrant 

 and given the option of going to jail or returning 

 to his master to work uuder him till the con- 

 tract is up. I know that in Ceylon at least this 

 provision extends to the case of even domestic 

 servants, for I noted a case of the kind when 

 passing through Colombo this year. Now if to 

 please the neo-anarchist, arrangements that 

 have been legal and useful in operation for fully 

 fifty years (Act XIII of 1859 is the Indian law 

 on the subject) are to be upset and the planter 

 left to the caprices of beings in a rudimentary 

 state of civilisation, it is about time to sound a 

 note of alarm, so that all who bear the white 

 man's burden may rally to the common cause ; 

 for anarchism is of no single nation. 



I have dwelt, I fear, too long on the political 

 aspect of the question, and have thus left myself 

 no space for discussing the various interesting 



PROBLEMS CONNECTED WITH THE AGRICULTURE, 



of the islands. In another letter I hope to give 

 you some particulars as to the staple product, 

 cacao, and the prospects of various subsidiary 

 cultures such as rubber, fibre, coffee, &c, all 

 of which are being tried on a minor but fairly 

 effective scale ; and to add a few notes on the 

 climate and soil as well as the life, European 

 and native, on the immense properties known as 

 rocas— each roca comprising an area equal to 

 half-a-dozen or more ordinary rubber planta- 

 tions in your part of the world. 



II. 



St. Thome, Portuguese West Africa, July 28. 



Dear Sib, — In my last letter I promised you 

 some further notes upon the products, actual 

 and possible, of this rich little colony, along 

 with a few impressions of the life upon the 

 rogas or plantations, and in the towns. But the 

 field turns out wider than anticipated, so rouoh 

 so that a single letter caunot describe the whole 

 ground. With your permission, however, I will try 

 to dispose of it in two or three letters, to follow. 

 Malarious Colonies. 



Both islands of the colony are highly mala- 

 rious, at least on their seaboard and among the 

 foothills of the fantastic pile of mountains for- 

 ming the core of each. Ten or fifteen years ago 

 the city of St. Thom6, a litter of packiug cases 

 acd corrugated iron dumped down in a swamp, 

 enjoyed the reputation, according to its own 

 Health Officer, of being the deadliest town of its 

 Bize in the world. Things have improved sinct> 

 then, but it is still true that neither hero nor in 

 S. Antonio de Principe can any white child born 

 and bred in their town hope to reach the age of 

 puberty. The West African Telegraph Co., whose 

 cable station, a comfortable two storied bunga- 

 low, stauding on a wind-swept dune well away 

 from the town of St. Thome, is inhabited by a 

 staff of three or four Englishmen (the only Bri- 

 tishers in the island) find it, so I am told, their 

 sickliest post in Western Africa, The streets of 



