at all,
had settled it in his own mind that slavery in England, or in any part
of the British Isles, was incompatible with the free constitution of
the realm, and that the forcible abduction of men and women from
African sea-shores in order to sell them into slavery was an offence
against civilization and Christianity. But this average Englishman did
not see that there was anything like the same {190} reason for
interfering with the system of slave labor as we had found it
established, for instance, in our West Indian colonies. "We did not
introduce the system there," it was argued; "we found it established
there; we inherited it; and its continuance is declared, by all those
who know, to be absolutely essential to the production of the sugar
which is the source of profit and the means of living to the islands
themselves, and an indispensable comfort, a harmless and healthful
luxury, to millions of civilized beings who never stood under a
tropical sky." The mind of the average Englishman, however, had been,
for some time, much disturbed by the arguments, the pleadings, and the
agitation of a small number of enlightened Reformers, at first much in
advance of their time, who were making a pertinacious crusade against
the whole system of colonial slavery. Some of these men have won names
which will always be honored in our history. Zachary Macaulay was one
of these. He was the father of the Macaulay whom we have just heard of
as seated side by side with Charles Greville at Lord Holland's
dinner-table. Zachary Macaulay had been the manager of a great West
Indian estate, but he had given up the position because his conscience
would not allow him to have anything to do with the system of slavery,
and he had come home to devote his time, his abilities, and his
earnestness to the generous task of rousing up his countrymen to a full
sense of the horrors which were inseparable from the system. He was
able to supply men like Brougham, like Fowell Buxton, and like
Whitbread with practical facts beyond dispute to establish the
realities of slavery in the West Indian colonies. Among the more
obvious, although not perhaps even the most odious, accompaniments of
the system were the frightful cruelties practised on the slaves, the
flogging, the mutilation, and the branding of men, women, and children
which formed part of the ordinary conditions of a plantation worked by
slave labor. Over and over again it had been denied by me