The chief interest for the British public in Portuguese colonies arises from two distinct causes—financial interests and treaty obligations. Our financial interests are not large; they involve certain railway schemes, the supply of labour for the Transvaal mines, and a few plantation and merchant enterprises. Our treaty obligations, binding us in definite alliance with Portugal, may at any moment involve Great Britain in a grave international situation. The value, or otherwise, of such an alliance is open to a difference of opinion. It is, however, imperative that our ally should observe all moral standards which the civilized Powers are pledged to maintain with all the forces at their disposal. Travellers, consuls, merchants, sea captains and government officials have repeatedly called attention to the prevailing slavery and slave-trade in Portuguese West Africa; both of which detestable practices are in gross violation of Anglo-Portuguese treaties, the Brussels and Berlin Acts. All, or any, of the civilized Powers can at any moment—and in point of responsibility should—intervene and demand the abolition of slavery in Angola, San Thomé and Principe, and if Portugal continued to beg the question by calling slavery by some other name, that Power, or those Powers, could, if they so desired, shake her out of her indifference by casting the anchor of a battleship in sight of the ports of San Thomé and St. Paul de Loanda. I am not advocating such a course for one moment, but it is vital that the British public should realize that in the event of any Power signatory to anti-slavery Conventions waking up for any reason, disinterested or otherwise, to treaty obligations, and making some effort to discharge those liabilities, such Power would be at once confronted by the possibility of Britain’s navy defending Portuguese colonies, although run by slave labour. A pretty spectacle indeed, Britain’s matchless fleet defending the slaver, only wanting old Jack Hawkins on the Bridge, to complete the picture! [Illustration: COCOA CARRYING, BELGIAN CONGO.] [Illustration: ENTRANCE TO COCOA ROÇA, PRINCIPE ISLAND. (PORTUGUESE.)] [Sidenote: MAINLAND SLAVERY]