ars later
it was educating two hundred thousand children. Its most earnest
champions were Rowland Hill and Mrs. Hannah More; but it is worthy of
note that this excellent lady, justly honoured as a pioneer of
elementary education, confined her curriculum to the Bible and the
Catechism, and "such coarse works as may fit the children for servants.
_I allow of no writing for the poor_."

To the Society of Friends--a body not historically or theologically
Evangelical--belongs the credit of having first awoke, and tried to
rouse others, to a sense of the horrors and iniquities involved in the
slave-trade; but the adhesion of William Wilberforce and his friends at
Clapham identified the movement for emancipation with the Evangelical
party. Never were the enthusiasm, the activity, the uncompromising
devotion to principle which marked the Evangelicals turned to better
account. Their very narrowness gave intensity and concentration to their
work, and their victory, though deferred, was complete. It has been
truly said that when the English nation had been thoroughly convinced
that slavery was a curse which must be got rid of at any cost, we
cheerfully paid down as the price of its abolition twenty millions in
cash, and threw the prosperity of our West Indian colonies into the
bargain. Yet we only spent on it one-tenth of what it cost us to lose
America, and one-fiftieth of what we spent in avenging the execution of
Louis XVI.

In spite of all these conspicuous and beneficent advances in the
direction of humanity, a great deal of severity, and what appears to us
brutality, remained embedded in our social system. I have spoken in
previous chapters of the methods of discipline enforced in the services,
in jails, in poorhouses, and in schools.[10] A very similar spirit
prevailed even in the home. Children were shut up in dark closets,
starved, and flogged. Lord Shaftesbury's father used to knock him down,
and recommended his tutor at Harrow to do the same. Archdeacon Denison
describes in his autobiography how he and his brothers were thrashed by
their tutor when they were youths of sixteen and had left Eton. _The
Fairchild Family_--that quaint picture of Evangelical life and
manners--depicts a religious father as punishing his quarrelsome
children by taking them to see a murderer hanging in chains, and as
chastising every peccadillo of infancy with a severity which makes one
long to flog Mr. Fairchild.

But still, in spite of all