§ MR. O'DONNELLsaid, he rose to call attention to the subject of Slavery in the Western Pacific. He hoped that, during the Recess, the attention of the Government would be directed to the painful disclosures which had been recently made with regard to the acts of combined piracy and slavery which were committed in the Western Pacific, under the guise of recruiting for free labourers. Over the whole of the Pacific Ocean, and among the most unsophisticated class of the Islanders, there was a most terrible amount of slave traffic going on. A number of ships wont every year, and, by fair means or foul, carried off large numbers of labourers from the South Sea and other groups of Islands to Queensland, where they were kept in practical servitude, the result being that whole Islands, according to the official Reports, were becoming depopulated by it. At the time this country was celebrating the jubilee of the abolition of Slavery in the West Indies, he hoped this insidious and hypocritical form of man-hunting in the Pacific would not be lost sight of, and that the Government would take steps to put an end to the evil.
§ Bill read the third time, and passed.