ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY. The and Aborigines Protection Society is a fusion of two societies, founded in 1837 and 1839 respectively. The Aborigines Protection Society was formed mainly through the efforts of Thomas Hodgkin and Thomas Fowell Buxton, as the outcome of a select parliamentary committee appointed to consider measures for securing justice for the natives in British possessions. The British and Foreign Anti Slavery Society, which succeeded other similar organizations established during the long struggle, aimed expressly at the uni versal extinction of slavery and the slave trade, Thomas Clarkson being its first president. As time went on, it was found that some degree of overlapping in the work of the two societies was avoidable, owing particularly to the growth of labour systems hardly distinguishable from slavery, and they were united in Slavery in Recent Times.—The objects of the society's work in the second half of the last century were many and various. They included the abuses of coolie indentured labour and the Kanaka and similar labour systems in the South Seas, slavery and the slave-trade in Egypt and the Sudan (upon which the Anti Slavery Society was in close touch with Gen. Gordon) ; slave dealing in Morocco and the southern Sahara, native labour in South Africa, domestic slavery in many parts of Africa, labour conditions in the New Hebrides, and the scandalous "contract labour" system from the interior of Portuguese Angola to the cocoa islands of S. Thome and Principe.
The Brussels Conference of 1889-90, and the General Act which followed, opened the way to fighting African slavery more effectively. Towards the end of the century the question of slavery in Zanzibar was predominant, and the society sent out its own commissioner to East Africa more than once to investigate conditions.
While slavery and the slave trade are now universally repro bated by civilized States, they still persist in outlying regions. The Slavery Commission of the League of Nations in 1925 re ported that the slave trade and "similar acts" prevail in 19 politi cal areas, including Abyssinia, China and Liberia. The more subtle forms of modern slavery, however, are those connected with the increasing demand for tropical and semi-tropical produce ; e.g., rubber, cotton, sugar, palm oil, etc., which cannot be gathered by white workers. This means a tendency to exploit unwilling labour.
Other forms of modern slavery are debt slavery, or peonage, as illustrated by the horrors disclosed, largely owing to the society's efforts in 1911-12, in the remote Putumayo region of the Upper Amazon. The society laboured successfully for the abolition of the Mui Tsai system in Hongkong, another form of slavery disguised-under the name of "adoption" of children. The society keeps in frequent communication with the League of Nations.