§ MR. BUXTONrose to call attention to the purchase and deportation from Egypt of a Negro Regiment by the Emperor of the French. The facts of the case were, he believed, beyond denial. Last year, or at some previous period, the Emperor of 652 the French arranged with Said Pasha, the late Pasha of Egypt, to hand over to him one or more battalions of his Negro soldiers. He understood that the Emperor applied for 1,500 men; however, only one battalion left Egypt before the death of the Pasha. The transaction was one of a very cruel character, for the conscription, as exercised in Egypt, was extremely harsh, and the way in which the Negro recruits were obtained was virtually a kind of slave trade. The Negroes were procured in the upper parts of Egypt by a sort of purchase from the chiefs, and he did not suppose there was a single Negro soldier in Egypt who was not serving against his own will. A conscription could only be excused as a measure of defence, and nothing could justify such a conscription as that he had described, where the soldiers, after being obtained with so much harshness, were sold to a foreign potentate, to be used in whatever manner he pleased. The intention in the present case was that the Negroes should be carried off to the most unhealthy parts of Mexico, there to discharge duties which it was thought French soldiers could not perform without destruction; though there was no reason for supposing that the Negro soldiers of Egypt would not equally suffer from the effects of the climate. It was matter of report what consideration; the Emperor of the French gave for the Negroes. It might have been money, but with equal probability it might have been some other quid pro quo. The whole I transaction, however, could be characterized as little less than a kind of slave trade. Whether purchased for money or not, the Negroes were taken from their homes and families without the smallest prospect of ever returning, and were carried off to perish in a distant country. It would be recollected that the Emperor of the French three or four years ago uttered a beautiful sentiment on the subject of the slave trade. France, he said, would no longer patronize the slave trade, because her mission was to march at the head of the civilization of the world; or something to that effect. The case of the Negro soldiers of Egypt afforded another proof of the fact that when the Emperor of the French delivered a noble phrase something was sure to follow immediately of a directly opposite character. ["Oh!"] At all events, the purchase and deportation of the Negro soldiers was an exceedingly base and cruel transaction, and he 653 had only done his duty in calling attention to it.
§ VISCOUNT PALMERSTONMy hon. Friend has adverted to a transaction which certainly is a very irregular and unfortunate one, and which in some of the details of its execution is liable to greater censure than my hon. Friend has applied to it. The facts may be briefly stated. The French Government, finding that the exposure of French troops to the climate of Mexico, under certain conditions, was attended with great sickness, thought that by enlisting a certain number of Africans they might get persons more able from their constitution to undergo the trial to which their troops were unequal. They accordingly sent orders to their officers in Egypt to endeavour to enlist 1,000 Africans for service in Mexico. The late Pasha of Egypt was a man of very easy temperament, and was often disposed to go beyond the demands made upon him; and the system of administration in Egypt, I am sorry to say, is tainted in many respects with the barbarous usages of times gone by. Among those usages is the practice of compelling forced labour— the seizure of people, whether they will or no, for purposes of employment. Without any delay the Pasha ordered a regiment of 450 Nubians to leave the fortress where they were stationed, and march down to Alexandria, where they were forthwith embarked on board a French frigate, not knowing why or whither they were going. That was sufficiently irregular, because the Egyptian troops belong to the Sultan. The Sultan is the Sovereign of Egypt, and the inhabitants of Egypt are his subjects. It is not competent for the vassal of any Sovereign to dispose of any portion of his military force without the authority of the Sovereign himself. The Pasha, therefore, had no right whatever to send this regiment of Nubians to serve under a foreign Sovereign without the previous sanction and consent of his own superior. That, evidently, was very irregular, and was not probably the intention of the French Government, because their instruction was that an endeavour should be made to enlist freely a certain number of Africans for service in Mexico, which was to be accepted or declined as the Nubians thought fit. But, not content with this irregularity, the Egyptian Government committed an act which is exactly similar 654 in violence and cruelty to that which has lately been committed in Warsaw. They sent their people out to the streets and quays of the towns, and seized every black man whom they thought fit for military duty or hard labour, without reference to what their former employment had been, tore them away from their homes and families, and embarked them on board a French frigate bound for Mexico. I am speaking, of course, of Nubians, not whites; but Negroes have homes and families as well as their neighbours, and the same attachment to the place of their birth. I cannot help believing that the French Government, who have expressed so strong a condemnation of the system practised in Warsaw and other Polish towns —the system, namely, of seizing people arbitrarily for service in the Russian army— will feel that an act of exactly the same cruelty, or perhaps even worse—for the Nubians were to be carried off to an unhealthy climate instead of being distributed among the quarters of the Russian army—has been perpetrated in a manner very different from that which they intended, and that, as far as it may he in their power to repair the wrong, they will do so. Her Majesty's Government have expressed to the Government of France their opinion that the transaction was irregular, that it was a violation of the rights of the Sultan, and that the Pasha of Egypt was not entitled to dispose of the subjects of the Sultan without the Sultan's consent.