The Servitude of Rubber and Cocoa - Putumayo Rubber page 2

There remained but one practical step - namely, that of securing the winding up of the Company. For this purpose a small group of shareholders placed in the hands of the Anti-Slavery Society the necessary powers, and on March 19, 1913, petition for winding up the Company was presented to Mr. Justice Swinfen Eady and the petition succeeded. The concluding words of the judgment were as follows: I am quite satisfied upon the whole of the case, both with regard to the manner in which the operations of the Company were conducted in the Putumayo district and in Brazil, and with regard to the way in which the financial transactions in this country have been concerned, that it is a case in which there ought to be a Compulsory Order to be followed by the fullest investigation, and that Senor Arana is the last person to whom the conduct of that investigation ought to be allocated. Under these circumstances I make the Compulsory Order.

Thus was registered another triumph of justice and humanity over a great and terrible tragedy of slavery. For this triumph Mr. Charles Roberts was mainly responsible. He was not content to act as a figure-head Chairman of the Select Committee, but gave without stint his time and thought to the task of unravelling and exposing the truth, and searched through every document submitted to the Committee, visited Government departments and even the Company's offices in order to equip himself with every scrap of information which would assist the Select Committee in arriving at the truth, and in thereby liberating the Indians of South America from the really ghastly system of oppression under which they were suffering.

The work of Mr. Charles Roberts as Chairman of the Putumayo Select Committee formed one of the subjects of a book ('Minor statesmen' - Viscount Peel, Lord Banbury, Lord Reading, Lord Milner, Lord Cecil, Josiah Wedgwood, Charles Roberts and others.) published by Truth and written by the pen of a brilliant writer. Through the courtesy of the Editor I am allowed to publish certain extracts from his appreciation: Charles Roberts started life with almost everything against him - the son of a clergyman, a Balliol scholar, a tutor of Exeter College, and a violent teetotaller - it was much, very much for a rising politician to live down.... When this zealous young man was made chairman of the Putumayo Committee, old Parliamentary hands, as they say in Ireland, shook their heads. People of discretion pointed out that it would be just like Charles Roberts, in his impetuous way, to get at the truth which is not the function of the chairman....

Although it was quite irrelevant to the inquiry, he substituted a map of Peru for the usual whitewash. In his donnish way he began to pick up Spanish, which was also going far beyond the terms of reference. He allowed exhibits to be laid before the Committee which were distinctly rude, and for days at a time the room was as unpleasant a place of propaganda as the anti-vivisection shop in Piccadilly. Then there came that thrilling morning when he gorgonised Mr. Lowther, and, armed with a Speaker's warrant, charged down upon the Peruvian Amazon Company's offices, and, after collaring their books, returned triumphantly to Westminster with his taxicab groaning and howling under the "1 weight of the booty....

In the meantime countless Indians on the Amazon and the Putumayo have reason to bless him in their prayers for as courageous an investigation of nameless horrors as stands to the credit of any Parliamentarian since the days of J Shaftesbury and Plimsoll.