The Years of Endurance by Arthur Bryant Page B

inhumanity as the popular condemnation of the slave trade. This movement ran directly counter to the immediate material interests of the country; it none the less steadily gained strength from its inception by a handful of Quakers in the 'sixties until at the end of the century it was espoused by the Prime Minister himself and the overwhelming majority of thinking Englishmen.
    The transatlantic slave trade had grown up to meet the needs of Britain's plantations in the West Indies and American colonies. Its headquarters was Liverpool, whose merchants imported seven-eighths of the negroes brought from Africa to America. In return for the slaves sold to the planters, they brought back to England sugar, rum, cotton, coffee. Thus the whole of the country indirectly benefited from this horrible traffic The slaves, many of whom were kidnapped, were taken from the West African coast across the " Middle Passage " to the West Indies in crowded slavers, loaded three slaves to a ton, the poor chained wretches being packed so tightly between decks that they were often forced to He on top of one another. The mortality both of seamen and human cargo was appalling, but the smaller the consignment of slaves that arrived, the better the price paid for the remainder. For the laws of supply and demand, when allowed to find their true level, always operated beneficially!
    As is the way with conservative-minded people whose interests are vested in an abuse, every reason was found to justify the continuance of the traffic. 1 Liverpool merchants and their parliamentary
     
    1 Bos well in his Life of Johnson went so far as to claim that " to abolish a status which in all ages God has sanctioned and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow subjects, but it would be extreme cruelty to the African savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre or intolerable bondage in their own country and introduces into a much happier state of life. . . . To abolish that trade would be to * shut the gates of mercy on mankind. 5 " Many honourable men at the time agreed with him.
     
    2 Rochefoucauld (p. 31) noted with astonishment that the sideboards of the most aristocratic houses were furnished with chamberpots which, after the departure of the ladies, were resorted to freely by the gentlemen as the drink circulated.
     

     
    representatives declared that, were a measure passed to regulate the miseries of the Middle Passage, the West Indian trade would be ruined, Britain's commercial supremacy lost and the Navy be left denuded of trained seamen.
     
    Yet having once been brought to the not very observant notice of the British people, the slave trade was doomed. For with all its barbaric survivals, Britain was a land of decent folk: of men and women with conscience. And because of the blend of freedom with order in British political institutions, the dictates of that conscience, though slow to mature, were ultimately given effect. Barbarous laws and customs 2 —men hanged in public for petty crimes, lunatics chained to the wall knee-deep in verminous straw, animals tortured at Smithfield and in the bull-ring—of these and their like there were plenty, but they were continually being ameliorated by the advancing pressure of public opinion. Gradually but instinctively a nation of freemen turned towards the light. That age-long process was the justification of their freedom.
    For by freedom the English meant something more than freedom for themselves, though they certainly meant that. Conventional and conservative in their prejudices, often thoughtless and mentally lazy, they yet genuinely valued freedom for its own sake: for others, that is, as well as for themselves. And their ideal of liberty was never an abstraction. It was based not on generalising but on measuring: on an impartial calculation of the comparative rights and wrongs of every individual case. Burke's dictum, " If I cannot reform with equity, I will not