304
ENGLAND'S RECORD ON THE SLAVE QUESTION
abolition. He indulged in some severe strictures on the record of our nation, and in pungent words and pointed periods denounced its people and government for being thirty years behind England in removing from the body politic the loathsome canker of slavery.
While such a statement of the case is doubtless true, as a naked, isolated fact, yet it is very far from being the whole truth; and its general incorporation into history, unexplained by the attendant conditions and circumstances, would be an unnecessary sacrifice of our national reputation to the Juggernaut of English arrogance and hypocrisy.
In reviewing the records of both England and America under the noonday blaze of later developments, there are at least three salient points in the subject which thrust themselves upon our attention. Without a full survey and close scrutiny of these, we are liable to come to an erroneous conclusion, and on the one hand give unmerited praise to England, while on the other doing injustice to the patriots of our own nation. We must first, then, direct our attention to the grasp which the curse of slavery had obtained on each nation prior to any attempt at its destruction; then see what means were inherent in the constitution or provided by the laws of either nation for the eradication of the evil, and finally, glance briefly at the policy of England during the great American struggle for the establishment of universal liberty.
In the British Empire, slavery, as affecting the social or political status of the people, was nothing more than an excrescence. It extended to a mere outlying colony, having about as much influence on the course of English legislation as Alaska or Idaho has upon ours. The colonies directly interested in the perpetuation of slavery might have been completely severed from
the British dominions by act of the imperial parliament, and it is probable that not one half the people of the nation would have heard of the change or cared about it if they had. Those colonies, the only ones having at stake any direct, material interest, were powerless to prevent any action that the British parliament might see fit to take. They had no voice in the transactions of that august body; no means of shaping its policy or influencing its decisions.
In England itself slavery had not existed for centuries. It was not and never had been as in America, a part and parcel of the daily life of her people, intimately connected and interwoven with the whole political fabric. It was not, in fine, one of the institutions of the nation. The insignificance of the whole affair, in so far as it affected England and her colonies, may be gathered from the fact that the freedom of all the colonial slaves was purchased by the British government for the comparatively paltry sum of twenty million pounds sterling.
But while, in the British dominions, slavery was a mere excrescence, within the borders of our own nation it had assumed the proportions of a malignant cancer. It imminently threatened the national life. Extensive and powerful states, possessed of a controlling voice and influence in the councils of the country, were deeply interested in the perpetuation and extension of slavery. And those very states—states a large part of whose material wealth was made up of slaves—were able to shape and direct the legislation of the Union during the years that we loitered behind England in the abolition of slavery. How unlike was this to the condition of Jamaica, which had no control over the English policy. To convince men or states of the iniquity of any line of conduct is always most difficult