HILL COOLIES LANDING
AT THE MAURITIUS. |
The subject of the article which precedes this engraving,
makes it not inappropriate that we should here introduce
an illustration of another of those forms of human grievance,
which closely, in our humble opinion, approximate to the
crimes that are perpetrated by the slave-trade itself.
Here are groups of that particular class of labourers
which, in the  East
Indies, are termed hill coolies
- inveigled from their native clime and home, and imported
for the pur- |
pose of working out in a species of slave labour the
ends of gain of the planters and merchants of the Mauritius.
There is every reason to believe, moreover, that when
seduced into the strange land they are not treated with
even ordinary humanity; and owing to the state, or rather
suspension, of the laws having reference to their condition
in the colony, they have open to them no means of redress.
They are in fact the objects of a traffic, which is in
its spirit as iniquitous |
| and as polluted with self-interest as that of slavery
itself. The Times newspaper in a series of powerful
articles has, however, forced public attention upon the
subject; and we trust not to be ourselves backward in
a fair and manly advocacy of the depressed and unfortunate
cause of these aggrieved hill coolies. Our limits, however,
in the present number of our journal, will only admit
of our shadowing forth an idea of the evils of this sort
of slave emigration by the illustration which is the subject
of these remarks. |
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