Many officials predicted that slavery would die a “natural death” as a result of the abolition of the legal status of slavery and the provision that children born after March 31, 1901 were free. There were repeated pronouncements that slavery was “virtually dead” or “no longer existed” beginning in the first decade of colonial rule and continuing almost annually for the next two decades. In 1924, G. S. Browne could claim that there had been “no disruption” caused by the Slavery Ordinance, and those slaves who had not taken “even more advantage … of the liberal terms of the Ordinance” had failed to do so

Browne insisted that slavery “is gradually dying out.”

Yet a state akin to slavery persisted, as we have seen. Slaves remained on their masters' lands, sometimes tilling the soil under sharecropping arrangements and other times paying rent and murgu. Women remained in the harems of the wealthy, and the free daughters of slaves were pressed into concubinage. Even the slave trade persisted, with children filtering through the net of the anti-slavery patrols. The “natural death” that was frequently announced by the architects of legal-status abolition was slow and tortuous.