Arriving at the coast, they are sold, or contracted, to an employer, usually a planter of San Thomé or Principe, at a large advance on the interior price. They are then brought by the employer before a magistrate who draws up a contract in proper legal form. It makes not the slightest difference what the native answers to the questions asked him or whether he answers at all, a contract is drawn up in which he declares that he has come of his own free will to contract for his services at so much labour for so much pay, and that the contract holds good for five years. The contractor on his part agrees to pay a certain monthly wage and to provide food and clothing. The native is given a copy of the contract and a little tin cylinder in which to keep it, the sign and declaration of his freedom and protection by law. But hypocrisy can go even further; for these Portuguese, merchants and government officials, actually pose as _Philanthropists_. “See,” they say, “what we have done for these men and women. They were all slaves to black men, and we have redeemed them.” Philanthropy is usually unlucrative, but the genius of the Portuguese has made it pay. Despite the expiration of the contract at the end of five years and the promise of a free passage home, the native thus transported is never known to return. Henceforth he is one of a long line of men and women that labour on the cocoa fields all the day long, some of the women carrying babies on their backs—that labour in stolid silence under the lash or the prod of a sharpened stick from early morning till the sound of the evening bell. That they become debased and immoral is only what we should expect; and therefore the traffic in men’s bodies is also a traffic in men’s souls. So they live and toil, each day like all the others until the last short journey, when, as Mr. Nevinson describes, “their dead bodies are lashed to poles to be carried out and flung away in the forest.” But is there no relief to the dark picture? No compensation? Yes, there is some compensation. We get cheaper cocoa and plenty of chocolate.