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Amongst the most celebrated achievements of the great reformers and campaigners of the 19th century are two famous pieces of legislation. In 1808 Parliament passed an Act abolishing the Slave Trade throughout the British Empire. Twenty five years after that, in 1833, it passed an Act ending slavery itself. But two hundred years on, Parliament has returned to the subject – and this morning sees the publication of the report of the Select Committee of both Houses of Parliament on the Government’s draft Modern Slavery Bill. Slavery, it seems, just won’t go away. Why not? Well, according to some thinkers – Aristotle for example - slavery is natural. There are, he said, people who are slaves by nature – made for slavery if you like. On the contrary said Augustine, slavery is not natural to humankind. The first men were shepherds over flocks, not rulers over men – and in that original state of things no human had dominion, or lordship over another. But if slavery is unnatural in this sense, it is nonetheless ubiquitous, Augustine says, since we sinners do nothing quite as readily as lording it over one another. Augustine, we might say, seems to have won that argument with Aristotle, since no one would now defend slavery in principle – it is outlawed not only by those trailblazing Acts of Parliament, but by every major code or convention relating to human rights. Augustine would not be surprised, however, that in practice slavery has never gone away – it has just gone under cover, in a dark and illicit trade said by the UN to be up there, in terms of financial significance, with the trade in illegal drugs. Someone giving evidence to the Parliamentary Committee made a telling point about the reach of this trade by pointing out that probably everyone present in the room would be wearing at least one garment produced with some element of forced labour. We all remember the great burger scandal of last year when it was discovered that some beef burgers were tainted with horsemeat – the food companies’ supply chains were often as long as a string of sausages, and so very long that some could have no real assurance about what they were buying and from whom. Well, so it is in the production and manufacture of many of the consumer goods which are found in UK shops – if we were to follow the supply chain back to the beginning, we might very well find a taint of slavery. Modern campaigners against slavery have a harder task than their nineteenth century forebears. The great campaigners of 200 years ago campaigned against a highly visible trade – but their achievement means that their successors are combating a trade which has necessarily become rather good at hiding. That slavery does not parade itself in public view is certainly a step forwards; but surely those great campaigners would be egging parliament on to get the bill right and on the books and complete the work which was only begun back then.