they occasionally gave rise, fill hundreds of volumes. They seemed to have reached the height of their intensity in Dutch Guiana and the British West Indies. "For a hundred years slaves in Barbadoes were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left to starve to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar, whipped to death."
It would be beyond the scope of this volume to deal with the long struggle waged by Clarkson, Sharp, Wilberforce, and others against the trade, the gradual awakening of the public conscience to its infamies, and the final triumph of the reformers. To Burke, more than to any man, is probably due the changed mental attitude of England towards the rights and the wrongs of coloured peoples, which ultimately enabled the efforts of Wilberforce and his colleagues to attain fruition. In Sir Charles Dilke's incessant labours for the same ends during the closing years of the 19th, and the opening years of the 20th Century, a later generation will perceive more vividly perhaps than does the present one, the persistence of a Parliamentary tradition which has helped to undo something of the evils of official England's African record, and caused her in recent years to give to the colonising Governments of Europe as good an example, on the whole, as the bad one she so long personified. But neither the vigour which Britain showed in the early part of last century in stamping out the slave trade which had conduced so largely to her prosperity in the previous one, nor her condemnation of its revival in inverted form on the Congo, nor the comparatively better treatment she has meted out to her coloured subjects during the past half century would qualify her, in view of her terrible past performances, to exercise the functions of judge in relation to the offences of her contemporaries.
Nor are Britain's hands wholly clean to-day. The hands of every European Power which has had dealings with him is stained deep with the blood of the African. For any such Power to approach the African problem on the morrow of the Great War otherwise than with a consciousness of past sins, would be to proclaim itself hypocrite in the eyes of the world. What Britons may legitimately hope for from their rulers is that British policy, devoid of pharisaism, may be directed patiently,
