acious patrons had sent him
to Eton in his fifteenth year. The Oxford professor of Arabic, Joseph
White (1746-1814), was son of a poor weaver in the country and a man of
reputation for learning, although now remembered only for a rather
disreputable literary squabble. Robert Owen and Joseph Lancaster, both
sprung from the ranks, were leaders in social movements. I have already
spoken of such men as Watt, Telford, and Rennie; and smaller names might
be added in literature, science, and art. The individualist virtue of
'self-help' was not confined to successful money-making or to the
wealthier classes. One cause of the literary excellence of Burns, Paine,
and Cobbett may be that, when literature was less centralised, a writer
was less tempted to desert his natural dialect. I mention the fact,
however, merely to suggest that, whatever were then the difficulties of
getting such schooling as is now common, an energetic lad even in the
most neglected regions might force his way to the front.

NOTES:

[115] _Police_, p. 340.

[116] Wilberforce started on this plan a 'society for enforcing the
king's proclamation' in 1786, which was supplemented by the society for
'the Suppression of Vice' in 1802. I don't suppose that vice was much
suppressed. Sydney Smith ridiculed its performances in the _Edinburgh_
for 1809. The article is in his works. A more interesting society was
that for 'bettering the condition of the poor,' started by Sir Thomas
Bernard and Wilberforce in 1796.

[117] _Biographia Literaria_ (1847), ii. 327.

IV. THE SLAVE-TRADE

I have thus noticed the most conspicuous of the contemporary problems
which, as we shall see, provided the main tasks of Bentham and his
followers. One other topic must be mentioned as in more ways than one
characteristic of the spirit of the time. The parliamentary attack upon
the slave-trade began just before the outbreak of the revolution. It is
generally described as an almost sudden awakening of the national
conscience. That it appealed to that faculty is undeniable, and,
moreover, it is at least a remarkable instance of legislative action
upon purely moral grounds. It is true that in this case the conscience
was the less impeded because it was roused chiefly by the sins of men's
neighbours. The slave-trading class was a comparative excrescence. Their
trade could be attacked without such widespread interference with the
social order as was implied, for example, in remedying the