and their posterity, by conferring on them the benefits of Christian education.” Among the original trustees of the Slater Fund were Rutherford B. Hayes, Morrison R. Waite, William E. Dodge, Phillips Brooks, Daniel C. Oilman, Morris K. Jesup and the donor’s son, William A. Slater; and among members chosen later were Melville W. Fuller, William E. Dodge, Jr., Henry C. Potter, Cleveland H. Dodge and Seth Low. In 1909 by careful investment the fund had increased, in spite of expenditures, to more than $1,500,000. The fund has been of great value in aiding industrial schools in the South, its largest beneficiaries being the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute of Hampton, Virginia, the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute of Tuskegee, Alabama, Spelman Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia, Claflin University in Orangeburg, S.C., and Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee. At Winston-Salem, N.C., is the Slater State Normal and Industrial School, founded in 1892 and named after the founder of the fund. Other state normal schools for negroes have received assistance from the fund; and in some cases it has contributed directly to the school boards of Southern cities.
SLATER, SAMUEL (1768–1835), American textile
manufacturer, was born in Belper, Derbyshire, England, on the
9th of June 1768. In 1783, the year after his father’s death,
he was apprenticed to Jedediah Strutt, his neighbour and a
partner of Richard Arkwright in spinning cotton, and served
under him six and a half years. Learning that the Pennsylvania
legislature had granted £100 in 1789 to the inventor of a power
carding machine, he removed to the United States in that year,
but was unable because of British laws to bring with him drawings
of cotton-spinning machinery. He wrote to Moses Brown of
Providence, R.I., who had made unsuccessful attempts to
manufacture cotton cloth, and in January 1790 on Brown’s
invitation went to Pawtucket, R.I., where he entered into a
partnership with William Almy (Moses Brown’s son-in-law)
and Smith Brown, a kinsman of Moses Brown, designed (from
memory) machines for cotton-spinning, and turned out some
yarn in December of the same year. In 1799 he established
in his mills one of the first Sunday Schools in America. In
1801 he built a factory in Rehoboth, Mass., and with his
brother John, who joined him in 1804, established in 1806 the
manufacturing village of Slatersville, in Smithfield township,
Rhode Island. He began the manufacture of woollen cloth in
1815–1816 at Oxford, now Webster, Mass., where he had built
cotton mills in 1812. In his later years he was interested
in other textile mills and in iron foundries in Rhode Island.
He died at Webster, Mass., on the 21st of April 1835. He has
been called the “father of American manufactures” and it is
no exaggeration to call him the founder of American cotton manufacturing.
See G. S. White, Memoir of Samuel Slater (2nd ed., Philadelphia, 1846).
SLATIN, SIR RUDOLF CARL VON (1857–),
Anglo-Austrian soldier and administrator in the Sudan, was born on the 27th of June 1857 at Ober St Veit near Vienna. At the age of seventeen he made his first journey to the Sudan, reaching Khartum by the Nile route in October 1875 in company with Theodor von Heuglin (q.v.). Thence he went through Kordofan to Dar Nuba, exploring the mountains of that region. He returned to Khartum in consequence of a revolt of the Arabs against the Egyptian government. There Slatin met Dr Emin (Emin Pasha) and with him purposed visiting General C. G. Gordon at Lado, Gordon at that time being governor of the equatorial provinces. Slatin, however, was obliged to return to Austria without accomplishing his desire, but Emin went to Lado and at Slatin’s request recommended the young traveller to Gordon for employment in the Sudan. In 1878, while Slatin was serving as a lieutenant in the crown prince Rudolf’s regiment in the Bosnian campaign he received a letter from Gordon inviting him to the Sudan, of which country Gordon had become governor general. At the close of the campaign Slatin received permission to go to Africa and he arrived at Khartum in January 1879. After a brief period during which he was financial inspector, Slatin was appointed mudir (governor) of Dara, the south-western part of Darfur, a post he held until early in 1881, when he was promoted governor-general of Darfur and given the rank of bey. While administering Dara, Slatin
conducted a successful campaign against one of the Darfur princes in revolt, and as governor of Darfur he endeavoured to remedy many abuses. He had soon to meet the rising power of the mahdi Mahommed Ahmed (q.v.). Early in 1882 the Arabs in southern Darfur were in revolt. With insufficient resources and no succour from Khartum, Slatin gallantly defended his province. Though victorious in several engagements he lost ground. His followers attributing his non-success to the fact that he was a Christian, Slatin nominally adopted Islam. But all hope of maintaining Egyptian authority vanished with the news of the destruction of Hicks Pasha’s army and in December 1883 Slatin surrendered, refusing to make any further sacrifice of life in a hopeless cause. In the camp of the mahdi an attempt was made to use him to induce Gordon to surrender. This failing, Slatin was placed in chains, and on the morning of the 26th of January 1885, an hour or two after the fall of Khartum, the head of Gordon was brought to the camp and shown to the captive. Slatin was kept at Omdurman by the khalifa, being treated alternately with savage cruelty and comparative indulgence. At length, after over eleven years captivity, he was enabled, through the instrumentality of Sir Reginald (then Major) Wingate of the Egyptian Intelligence Department, to escape, reaching Egypt in March 1895. In a remarkable book, Fire and Sword in the Sudan, written in the same year and issued in English and German in 1896, Slatin gave not only, as stated in the sub-title, “a personal narrative of fighting and serving the dervishes” but a connected account of the Sudan under the rule of the khalifa. Raised to the rank of pasha by the khedive, Slatin received from Queen Victoria the Companionship of the Bath. On the eve of his surrender to the mahdi at Christmas 1883 he had resolved, if he regained his liberty, to use the knowledge he would acquire while in captivity for the eventual benefit of the country, and after a year’s rest he took part, as an officer on the staff of the Egyptian army, in the campaigns of 1897-98 which ended in the capture of Omdurman. For his services in these campaigns he was made a K.C.M.G. and in 1899 was ennobled by the emperor of Austria. In 1900 he was appointed Inspector-General of the Sudan, in which capacity his mastery of Arabic and his profound knowledge of the land and peoples proved invaluable in the work of reconstruction undertaken by the Anglo-Egyptian government in that country. In 1907 he was made an honorary major-general in the British army.
SLAUGHTER-HOUSE, or Abattoir. In the United Kingdom slaughter-houses are of two kinds, those which belong to individual butchers and those which belong to public authorities; the former are usually called private slaughter-houses, the latter public slaughter-houses.Private. Private slaughter-houses in existence in England before the passing of the Public Health Act 1875 were established without licence by the local authority, except in those towns to which the provisions of the Towns Improvement Clauses Act 1847, relating to slaughter-houses, were applied by special Act. By the Act of 1875 these provisions were extended to all urban districts. Subsequently to 1890 urban authorities adopting Part III. of the Public Health (Amendment Act) of that year could license for limited periods of not less than one year all slaughter-houses coming into existence after such adoption. In London, slaughter-houses have been licensed since 1855. Private slaughter-houses are frequently situated at the rear of the shop in which the meat is sold. Each consists of a compartment in which the animals are killed, and in association with this are the pounds in which a few animals can be kept pending slaughter. These buildings are regulated by by-laws made under the Public Health Act by the several urban sanitary authorities. The by-laws usually provide for the floor to be made of jointless paving, to ensure that the earth shall not be fouled in the process of slaughtering; for the walls to be cemented to a certain height above the floor, to provide a surface which can be easily cleaned; for the doors
