Historical Decency

Some fetters to be auctioned in Scotland were used by beastly Arab slave traders around 1780, a mere century before their evil doings were halted by a coalition of the virtuous including the British Empire, whose own slave trade was no longer around to provide a moral example of how it should be done. The auction has been condemned as profiting from oppression, in ways that the retention of the Crown Jewels self-evidently does not; and the only suggested solution appears to be public interest stewardship, which sounds suspiciously difficult to translate into either patriotism or economic growth. Even so, the ethical-historical debate is no doubt encouraging. Since many of our great nation's public buildings and much of its statuary are linked in one way or another to the Atlantic slave trade, and since practically all of our remaining tatters of prosperity are linked in one way or another to human rights abuses in the present, nothing could be more British than to erupt in righteous indignation over the legal sale of an antique symbol for hard work and playing by the rules.