climate—the great altitude in the one case and the humidity in the other—no European or Asiatic people could take the place of these people, whose work can only be accomplished by those who have paid Nature the homage of being born upon the soil and inured to its conditions throughout many generations.[12] It might have been supposed that from economic reasons alone the exploiters of native labour would have endeavoured to foster and preserve it, even if it were simply on the principle of feeding and stabling a horse in order to use its powers to the utmost. But this is not the case. The economic principle of conserving the efficiency of human labour by its employer, remarkable as it may seem, has never been recognised even in the most enlightened communities, or only very recently and in a very few instances. It is not necessary to go to the tropics to seek instances; they are evident no farther afield than among the ill-paid mining, dock, manufacturing, and other labour in Great Britain and the United States. The very abundance of labour has been its own undoing; the supply has seemed exhaustless and the tendency has been to squander it. The question is one of degree rather than of principle in any community or industry and at any time in history. But in the persecuted districts of Latin America native labour is practically being hounded off the face of the earth.

The Putumayo atrocities were first brought to public notice by an American engineer and his companion, Messrs. Hardenburg and Perkins, and the interesting narrative by the former of their travels upon the Putumayo River forms a large part of the subject of this book. Mr. Hardenburg and his companion suffered great hardships and imprisonment at the hands of the Peruvian agents of the rubber company on the Putumayo, and barely escaped with their lives. For these outrages some time afterwards they were awarded the sum of £500 damages by the Peruvian Government, due to the action of the United States. Mr. Hardenburg came to London from Iquitos in financial straits, but only with considerable difficulty was able to draw public attention to the occurrences on the Putumayo. Messrs. Hardenburg and Perkins’s account and indictment of the methods employed by the company’s agents on the Putumayo, under the name of “The Devil’s Paradise,” was a terrible one. It was averred that the peaceful Indians were put to work at rubber-gathering without payment, without food, in nakedness; that their women were stolen, ravished, and murdered; that the Indians were flogged until their bones were laid bare when they failed to bring in a sufficient quota of rubber or attempted to escape, were left to die with their wounds festering with maggots, and their bodies were used as food for the agents’ dogs; that flogging of men, women, and children was the least of the tortures employed; that the Indians were mutilated in the stocks, cut to pieces with machetes, crucified head downwards, their limbs lopped off, target-shooting for diversion was practised upon them, and that they were soused in petroleum and burned alive, both men and women. The details of these matters were almost too repugnant for production in print, and only their outline was published.

The first result of the publication of the Putumayo atrocities in the London Press was denial. The Peruvian Amazon Company denied the truth of the matter: the Peruvian Government denied the existence of such conditions; whilst the Peruvian Consul-General and Chargé d’Affaires in London denied them even more emphatically. In the minds of those acquainted with Latin-American methods denials would not carry much weight. To deny is the first resource of the Latin-American character and policy. It is an “Oriental” trait they possess, the curious obsession that efficient and sustained denial is the equal of truth, no matter what the real conditions. The Peruvian Consul in London wrote vehement letters of denial and re-denial to the London Press, among them the following, published by Truth in September, 1909:—

“This Legation categorically denies that the acts you describe, and which are severely punished by our laws, could have taken place without the knowledge of my Government on the Putumayo River, where Peru has authorities appointed direct by the supreme Government, and where a strong military garrison is likewise maintained.”[13]

Unfortunately, the statements of the representatives of certain of the South American republics in London cannot always be regarded as disinterested. Their Governments in some cases pay them no salary, and they are concerned in promoting and earning commissions from the flotation of rubber and mining companies in the particular regions they represent. Such a condition is often discreditable to the Latin-American republics. Officials who are shareholders in and recipients of commission from rubber company promoters with whom they are hand-in-glove are not likely to take an impartial view of the unfortunate native workers.

The Secretary of the Peruvian Amazon Company wrote in September, 1909, to the Anti-Slavery Society and Truth as follows:—

“The Directors have no reason to believe that the atrocities referred to have, in fact, taken place, and indeed have grounds for considering that they have been purposely mis-stated for indirect objects. Whatever the facts, however, may be, the Board of the company are under no responsibility for them, as they were not in office at the time of the alleged occurrences. It was not until your article appeared that the Board were aware of what is now suggested.”

The publication of the Putumayo occurrences has revealed once more that tinge of hypocrisy in the British character of which other nations have accused us. Or, rather than hypocrisy, it should perhaps be termed an intensive shopkeeping principle. Due to this spirit the exposure was greatly delayed. No one would publish the Hardenburg account, because as a book it might not have been a paying venture. Only when the way had been prepared for a successful book, by the public scandal which resulted after attention had been drawn to the matter, was it resolved to publish it. The London Press at first was equally negligent or timorous, with the exception of Truth. It showed little disposition to take the matter up, until that paper, whose business it is to expose scandals and abuses, exposed the horrors to public gaze. Then, when the matter had reached the stage of useful “copy,” it appeared in all the papers—in some cases with startling headlines. The daily papers feared that they would incur risk of libel proceedings in attacking what was regarded as a powerful London Company, with a capital of a million pounds and an influential Board of Directors, and at first hesitated to take the matter up. Had it not been for the work of the philanthropic society already mentioned, the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society,[14] in London, and the courage of the Editor of Truth, to both of whom Hardenburg went, followed by the prolonged publications in Truth, the sinister occurrences of the Putumayo might have remained unrevealed, and the unspeakable outrages on the Huitotos