THE ABOLITION OF THE SLAVE TRADE.

AHUNDRED years ago last Monday the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire received the Royal assent. If the British people are not so ready as the French to celebrate the recurrence of their great dates, they are still not exactly backward in doing so. Yet the centenary of the abolition of the slave trade has not been generally acclaimed, or even remembered, in the Press, although no date is more important in the march of civilisa- tion. One hardly ventures to think how much our progress would have been retarded, how much our humanity would have been beggared, if the unpopular cause of the Abolitionists had not been adopted by the great minds of the country, and turned at last into a popular cause just when it was. We hope we may assume that the neglect of the centenary simply means that one of the greatest of causes is so secure now that it is allowed to pass unnoticed only because it is taken for granted. The present writer can remember as a child seeing' a melodrama in which a negro slave, pursued by his owners, fell exhausted among a party of Englishmen, and clinging to the Union Jack, cried : "Here I am safe!" The audience, naturally cheered this highly correct sentiment, and it is mentioned here only because it shows that long after the abolition of the slave trade (and long after the abolition of slavery, which was a later step) the British flag was still felt to be sensibly a kind of anti-slavery symbol. Of course it remains so, and always will as long as it exists; but so old an ethical principle has our repugnance to slavery become that the significance of the scene we have described would be lost to-day in a sense of its superfluity.

Abolition was a tremendous event not only for the slaves, but for ourselves. Nothing is more demoralising to man than the ownership of man. Every ancient nation—Greece, Rome, the Assyrians, the Egyptians—which constructed itself upon the industry of slaves perished hopelessly. It might be tbought that in a humane man the sense of responsible ownership would enlarge his benevolence. History proves that this is not so. It is the owner who is demoralised more than "the slave. Mrs. Beecher-Stowe, who rendered her greatest service to Emancipation in the United States when she wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin," never produced anything philosophically snore true than " Dred," in which she developed this very argument. The nations of Western Europe plunged their hands into the slave trade when their colonies across the seas cried out continually for more labour.

The slave trade rose up to meet this demand. To some extent it must have been thought of as no more than a carrying trade,

and England, quick to adapt herself to all new forms of Wean

commerce, soon bad the greater part of the trade in her possession. Our Elizabethans carried slaves to the Spaniards of America. The search for slaves at last became a hunt.

Bristol and Liverpool became rich through shipping human chattels to distant parts of the world, where they laboured like oxen and died like doge. But that is true only of those who arrived at their destination; about half of those carried off died in the human-cattle ships during the voyage.

They did not die of brutality as a rule; they died because large aggregations of men herded together always sicken where quarters are cramped and sanitation is not understood.

Let us admit that the charge of mere brutality may have been easily and truthfully rebutted by ordinary Englishmen engaged in -the trade. It required more penetration than,

meths necessary to us now to perceive that the brutality was in the essence of the system, and that even its great profits

were economically unsound. profits. In 1790 it was estimated that England exported about forty thousand slaves. The Abolition movement was undertaken not only when the profits, of the trade were at their highest point, but when the country was groaning with debt. There seemed to be many economic excuses for delay, and the planters and shippers did not fail,

to make play with them. But the agitation begun by Quakers, and forced on the attention of the nation by the golden tongue of Wilberforce, was eventually supported by Pitt and Burke. To the eternal credit of the country, the renunciation of the infamous trade was made at a moment when its cost fell heaviest.

Thomas Clarkson's prize-essay, at Cambridge in 1785 was ,

destined to have far more than the influence which generally belongs to its class. The subject was "Anne liceat invites in servitutens dare ?" —Is it lawful to deliver men against their will into slavery P He read widely round his subject, and was deeply affected by it,. Particularly by narratives of the trade

in New Guinea. He turned his essay into English, and than devoted himself publicly to the cause of Abolition. In two years the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed. While Clarkson preached to the country, Wilber- force, "the nightingale of the House of Commons," employed his eloquence in Parliament. The peculiar interest of, Wilberforce's character, as the author of "Collections and Recollections" points out in an excellent biographical sketch in the Manchester Guardian, was the curious contrast between what be was, and what we would imagine the protagonist in so stern a conflict to have been. "No one," it was said, "touched life at so many points." Madame de Stall declared that she had always heard that Wilberforce was the most religious man in England, but she found him also the most agreeable. At Cambridge his gaiety and his songs made him popular as host and guest. When became to London he spent his time in social joys, and it the club at Goosetrees. In the House of Commons

he was charged with "religious facetiousness" by stupid persons

who did not understand that true humour is only the counter- part of sympathy and a serious Purpose. To such he spade his famous retort that there was no reason why a Christian should not be gay, but that an irreligious man did not necessarily escape being dull: His "puny form and' delicate health" (be looked as though '"a breath would blow Lima away ") 'made him a laughing-stock on the hustings at Hull till be became the darling of his constituents. Hip religious temperament led him eventually into a strict Evangelicalism. He "trusted to a prayer-meeting to carry it division in the House of Commons." He never ceased to pl his influence on hie* old Cambridge friend Pitt till he had converted' him to the cause of Abolition. It was under the oak in HoImwood Park, still cherished as a memento of the crusade, that Wilberforce exacted from Pitt his promise of support. Wilms Wilberforce delivered himself to the spiritual exaltation of the Evangelical Creed, he did not shirk the duty he conceived to be his of urging Pitt to the regeneration of his soul. He failed; but, as Lord Rosebery has said, "it was a memorable episode, this heart-searching of the young Saint and the young Minister." All his life Wilberforce refused office, lest it should divert him from his great end. He began life rich; be died poor. Thus the fundamental humanity of the British race, after forming itself little by little in the hearts of Pope, and Cowper, and Wesley, and Whitefield, and Dr. Johnson, and Adam Smith, and John Newton, who turned from commanding slave-ships to the same cast of Evangelicalism as that of Wilberforce himself, and wrote with Cowper the "Olney Hymns,"—this growing humanity became articulate in William Wilberforce. The prohibition of the slave trade on March 25th, 1807, at first aggravated the disease, because the slaves on the plantations were worked harder than ever as labour ;became scarcer. But that was an inevitable, though painful, stage; it was the inheritance of an inhuman traffic. Emancipation remained for another day. But the first real step towards it deserves to be remembered and honoured as much as any event in our history.