How comes it that in spite of endless “regulations,” almost every line of which boasts humane sentiments, and of a Government in Portugal which blazes upon the housetops its devotion to the cause of human freedom, these deplorable conditions prevail in the West African colonies? The reason has been advanced without any equivocation for years, namely:—the Portuguese colonies are out of control. Portugal may send a shipload of regulations out of the Tagus every week and the planters will welcome them—as waste paper. Some of us have said this for years and have suffered the inevitable abuse, but with the publication of the recent White Book, we actually find this contention corroborated by the Portuguese Government. Senhor Vasconcellos, replying to Sir Arthur Hardinge’s representations upon the abuses, admitted that:— “The Governors whom he had sent out to give effect to its (the Government’s) instructions had been to a great extent paralysed by the power of vested interests.” This is, of course, obvious to all those who realize the inner meaning of the fact that within ten years the cocoa islands have had something like twenty-five Governors. An admission of this nature by the responsible Portuguese Minister goes quite as far, if not farther, than the most extreme critic of Portuguese colonial administration. The existence of slavery and the slave-trade now corroborated by officials of the first rank in London and Lisbon, supported by Consuls, and now by the Portuguese themselves, leaves no longer any need for unofficial persons to spend further efforts in an endeavour to establish the fact. Sir Edward Grey’s “beyond doubt” is in itself sufficient for the great mass of sane men. With the breakdown of the Portuguese regulations and the violation of international treaties, coupled with the Portuguese admission that their colonies are out of hand, what can be done to set free the slave in San Thomé and Angola? [Sidenote: BRITISH SUBJECTS ENSLAVED]