ABSTRACT
THE salient conclusion which emerged from the exhaustive inquiries made by the Parliamentary Committees in the eighteen-forties was that Great Britain had so far failed to suppress the foreign Slave Trade. On the other hand it may be said that by the middle of the century she had succeeded in checking it, and in freeing some two thousand miles of the coast of Africa from its incidence. If the trade had been “left to itself,” as Hutt and his friends desired, there can be no doubt that it would have been immeasurably larger than it actually was. But all that can broadly be said of the combined achievements of the African Squadron and the negotiations of the Foreign Office between 1807 and 1850 is that the Trade had been driven south of the equator, and that the conscience of liberal-minded people in the civilised world had come to regard it as a disgrace to the honour of the white races. It could now only be carried on by men outside the pale of civilisation as a “black market” in a very literal sense of the word; it had become an illegal traffic which could, at best, be merely condoned by a corrupt government. Other consequences apart, that may be regarded as a satisfactory result of a foreign policy pursued for thirty years with a purely moral aim in view.
