go into war with the United States. It will be a war upon the ocean,--
every ship that belongs to the two nations will, as far as possible, be
swept from the seas. But when the troubles in America are over,--be they
ended by the restoration of the Union, or by separation,--that great and
free people, the most instructed in the world,--there is not an American
to be found in the New England States who cannot read and write, and
there are not three men in one hundred in the whole Northern States who
cannot read and write,--and those who cannot read and write are those
who have recently come from Europe,--I say the most instructed people in
the world, and the most wealthy,--if you take the distribution of wealth
among the whole people,--will have a wound in their hearts by your act
which a century may not heal; and the posterity of some of those who now
hear my voice may look back with amazement, and I will say with
lamentation, at the course which was taken by the hon. and learned
Gentleman, and by such hon. Members as may choose to follow his leading.
['No! No!'] I suppose the hon. Gentlemen who cry 'No!' will admit that
we sometimes suffer from the errors of our ancestors. There are few
persons who will not admit that, if their fathers had been wiser, their
children would have been happier.
We know the cause of this revolt, its purposes, and its aims. Those who
made it have not left us in darkness respecting their intentions, but
what they are to accomplish is still hidden from our sight; and I will
abstain now, as I have always abstained with regard to it, from
predicting what is to come. I know what I hope for,--and what I shall
rejoice in,--but I know nothing of future facts that will enable me to
express a confident opinion. Whether it will give freedom to the race
which white men have trampled in the dust, and whether the issue will
purify a nation steeped in crimes committed against that race, is known
only to the Supreme. In His hands are alike the breath of man and the
life of States. I am willing to commit to Him the issue of this dreaded
contest; but I implore of Him, and I beseech this House, that my country
may lift nor hand nor voice in aid of the most stupendous act of guilt
that history has recorded in the annals of mankind.
* * * * *
AMERICA.
VII.
LONDON, JUNE 29, 1867.
[The following speech was made at a public breakfast given to William
Lloyd Garrison, in St. James's Hall, at which Mr. Bright occupied the
Chair.]
The position in which I am placed this morning is one very unusual for
me, and one that I find somewhat difficult; but I consider it a signal
distinction to be permitted to take a prominent part in the proceedings
of this day, which are intended to commemorate one of the greatest of
the great triumphs of freedom, and to do honour to a most eminent
instrument in the achievement of that freedom. There may be, perhaps,
those who ask what is this triumph of which I speak. To put it briefly,
and, indeed, only to put one part of it, I may say that it is a triumph
which has had the effect of raising 4,000,000 of human beings from the
very lowest depth of social and political degradation to that lofty
height which men have attained when they possess equality of rights in
the first country on the globe. More than this, it is a triumph which
has pronounced the irreversible doom of slavery in all countries and for
all time. Another question suggests itself--how has this great triumph
been accomplished? The answer suggests itself in another question--How
is it that any great thing is accomplished? By love of justice, by
constant devotion to a great cause, and by an unfaltering faith that
what is right will in the end succeed.
When I look at this hall, filled with such an assembly--when I partake
of the sympathy which runs from heart to heart at this moment in welcome
to our guest of to-day--I cannot but contrast his present position with
that which, not so far back but that many of us can remember, he
occupied in his own country. It is not forty years ago, I believe about
the year 1829, when the guest whom we honour this morning was spending
his solitary days in a prison in the slave-owning city of Baltimore. I
will not say that he was languishing in prison, for that I do not
believe; he was sustained by a hope that did not yield to the
persecution of those who thus maltreated him; and to show that the
effect of that imprisonment was of no avail to suppress or extinguish
his ardour, within two years after that he had the courage, the
audacity--I dare say many of his countrymen used even a stronger phrase
than that--he had the courage to commence the publication, in the city
of Boston, of a newspaper devoted mainly to the question of the
abolition of slavery. The first number of that paper, issued on the 1st
of January, 1831, contained an address to the public, one passage of
which I have often read with the greatest interest, and it is a key to
the future life of Mr. Garrison. He had been complained of for having
used hard language--which is a very common complaint indeed--and he said
in his first number:--
'I am aware that many object to the severity of my language, but
is there not cause for such severity? I will be as harsh as
truth, and as uncompromising as justice. I am in earnest, I will
not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retract a single
inch, and I will be heard.'
And that, after all, expresses to a great extent the future course of
his life. But what was at that time the temper of the people amongst
whom he lived--of the people who are glorying now, as they well may
glory, in the abolition of slavery throughout their country? At that
time it was very little better in the North than it was in the South. I
think it was in the year 1835 that riots of the most serious character
took place in some of the Northern cities: during that time Mr.
Garrison's life was in imminent peril; and he has never ascertained to
this day how it was that he was left alive on the earth to carry out his
great work. Turning to the South, a State that has lately suffered from
the ravages of armies, the State of Georgia, by its legislature of
House, Senate, and Governor, if my memory does not deceive me, passed a
bill, offering 10,000 dollars reward--[Mr. Garrison here said '5,000']--
well, they seemed to think there were people who would do it cheap--
offering 5,000 dollars, and zeal, doubtless, would make up the
difference, for the capture of Mr. Garrison, or for adequate proof of
his death. Now, these were menaces and perils such as we have not in our
time been accustomed to in this country in any of our political
movements, and we shall take a very poor measure indeed of the conduct
of the leaders of the Emancipation party in the United States if we
estimate them by that of any of those who have been concerned in
political movements amongst us. But, notwithstanding all drawbacks, the
cause was gathering strength, and Mr. Garrison found himself by-and-by
surrounded by a small but increasing band of men and women who were
devoted to this cause, as he himself was. We have in this country a very
noble woman, who taught the English people much upon this question about
thirty years ago: I allude to Harriet Martineau. I recollect well the
impression with which I read a most powerful and touching paper which
she had written, and which was published in the number of the
_Westminster Review_ for December, 1838. It was entitled 'The
Martyr Age of the United States.' The paper introduced to the English
public the great names which were appearing on the scene in connection
with this cause in America. There was, of course I need hardly say, our
eminent guest of to-day; there was Arthur Tappan, and Lewis Tappan, and
James G. Birney of Alabama, a planter and slave-owner, who liberated his
slaves and came North, and became, I believe, the first Presidential
candidate upon Abolition principles in the United States. There were
besides them, Dr. Channing, John Quincy Adams, a statesman and President
of the United States, and father of the eminent man who is now Minister
from that people amongst us. Then there was Wendell Phillips, admitted
to be by all who know him perhaps the most powerful orator who speaks
the English language. I might refer to others, to Charles Sumner, the
scholar and statesman, and Horace Greeley, the first of journalists in
the United States, if not the first of journalists in the world. But,
besides these, there were of noble women not a few. There was Lydia
Maria Child; there were the two sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimke,
ladies who came from South Carolina, who liberated their slaves, and
devoted all they had to the service of this just cause; and Maria Weston
Chapman, of whom Miss Martineau speaks in terms which, though I do not
exactly recollect them, yet I know describe her as noble-minded,
beautiful, and good. It may be that there are some of her family who are
now within the sound of my voice. If it be so, all I have to say is,
that I hope they will feel, in addition to all they have felt heretofore
as to the character of their mother, that we who are here can appreciate
her services, and the services of all who were united with her as co-
operators in this great and worthy cause. But there was another whose
name must not be forgotten, a man whose name must live for ever in
history, Elijah P. Lovejoy, who in the free State of Illinois laid down
his life for the cause. When I read that article by Harriet Martineau,
and the description of those men and women there given, I was led, I
know not how, to think of a very striking passage which I am sure must
be familiar to most here, because it is to be found in the Epistle to
the Hebrews. After the writer of that Epistle has described the great
men and fathers of the nation, he says:--'Time would fail me to tell of
Gideon, of Barak, of Samson, of Jephtha, of David, of Samuel, and the
Prophets, who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness,
obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of
fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong,
waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.' I
ask if this grand passage of the inspired writer may not be applied to
that heroic band who have made America the perpetual home of freedom?
Thus, in spite of all that persecutions could do, opinion grew in the
North in favour of freedom; but in the South, alas! in favour of that
most devilish delusion that slavery was a Divine institution. The moment
that idea took possession of the South, war was inevitable. Neither
fact, nor argument, nor counsel, nor philosophy, nor religion, could by
any possibility affect the discussion of the question when once the
Church leaders of the South had taught their people that slavery was a
Divine institution; for then they took their stand on other and
different, and what they in their blindness thought higher grounds, and
they said, 'Evil! be thou my good;' and so they exchanged light for
darkness, and freedom for bondage, and good for evil, and, if you like,
heaven for hell. Of course, unless there was some stupendous miracle,
greater than any that is on record even in the inspired writings, it was
impossible that war should not spring out of that state of things; and
the political slaveholders, that 'dreadful brotherhood, in whom all
turbulent passions were let loose,' the moment they found that the
presidential election of 1860 was adverse to the cause of slavery, took
up arms to sustain their cherished and endangered system. Then came the
outbreak which had been so often foretold, so often menaced; and the
ground reeled under the nation during four years of agony, until at
last, after the smoke of the battle-field had cleared away, the horrid
shape which had cast its shadow over a whole continent had vanished, and
was gone for ever. An ancient and renowned poet has said--
'Unholy is the voice
Of loud thanksgiving over slaughtered men.'
It becomes us not to rejoice, but to be humbled, that a chastisement so
terrible should have fallen upon any of our race; but we may be thankful
for this--that this chastisement was at least not sent in vain. The
great triumph in the field was not all; there came after it another
great triumph--a triumph over passion, and there came up before the
world the spectacle, not of armies and military commanders, but of the
magnanimity and mercy of a powerful and victorious nation. The
vanquished were treated as the vanquished, in the history of the world,
have never before been treated. There was a universal feeling in the
North that every care should be taken of those who had so recently and
marvellously been enfranchised. Immediately we found that the privileges
of independent labour were open to them, schools were established in
which their sons might obtain an education that would raise them to an
intellectual position never reached by their fathers; and at length full
political rights were conferred upon those who a few short years, or
rather months before, had been called chattels, and things, to be bought
and sold in any market. And we may feel assured, that those persons in
the Northern States who befriended the negro in his bondage will not now
fail to assist his struggles for a higher position. May we not say,
reviewing what has taken place--and I have only glanced in the briefest
possible way at the chief aspects of this great question--that probably
history has no sadder, and yet, if we take a different view, I may say
also probably no brighter page? To Mr. Garrison more than to any other
man this is due; his is the creation of that opinion which has made
slavery hateful, and which has made freedom possible in America. His
name is venerated in his own country--venerated where not long ago it
was a name of obloquy and reproach. His name is venerated in this
country and in Europe wheresoever Christianity softens the hearts and
lessens the sorrows of men; and I venture to say that in time to come,
near or remote I know not, his name will become the herald and the
synonym of good to millions of men who will dwell on the now almost
unknown continent of Africa.
But we must not allow our own land to be forgotten or depreciated, even
whilst we are saying what our feelings bid us say of our friend beside
me and of our other friends across the water. We, too, can share in the
triumph I have described, and in the honours which the world is willing
to shower upon our guest, and upon those who, like him, are unwearied in
doing good. We have had slaves in the colonial territories that owned
the sway of this country. Our position was different from that in which
the Americans stood towards theirs; the negroes were far from being so
numerous, and they were not in our midst, but 4,000 miles away. We had
no prejudices of colour to overcome, we had a Parliament that was
omnipotent in those colonies, and public opinion acting upon that
Parliament was too powerful for the Englishmen who were interested in
the continuance of slavery. We liberated our slaves; for the English
soil did not reject the bondsman, but the moment he touched it made him
free. We have now in our memory Clarkson, and Wilberforce, and Buxton,
and Sturge; and even now we have within this hall the most eloquent
living English champion of the freedom of the slave in my friend, and
our friend, George Thompson. Well, then, I may presume to say that we
are sharers in that good work which has raised our guest to eminence;
and we may divide it with the country from which he comes. Our country
is still his; for did not his fathers bear allegiance to our ancient
monarchy, and were they not at one time citizens of this commonwealth?
and may we not add that the freedom which now overspreads his noble
nation first sprang into life amongst our own ancestors? To Mr.
Garrison, as is stated in one of the letters which has just been read,
to William Lloyd Garrison it has been given, in a manner not often
permitted to those who do great things of this kind, to see the ripe
fruit of his vast labours. Over a territory large enough to make many
realms, he has seen hopeless toil supplanted by compensated industry;
and where the bondman dragged his chain, there freedom is established
for ever. We now welcome him amongst us as a friend whom some of us have
known long; for I have watched his career with no common interest, even
when I was too young to take much part in public affairs; and I have
kept within my heart his name, and the names of those who have been
associated with him in every step which he has taken; and in public
debates in the halls of peace, and even on the blood-soiled fields of
war, my heart has always been with those who were the friends of
freedom. We welcome him, then, with a cordiality which knows no stint
and no limit for him and for his noble associates, both men and women;
and we venture to speak a verdict which, I believe, will be sanctioned
by all mankind, not only by those who live now, but by those who shall
come after, to whom their perseverance and their success shall be a
lesson and a help in the future struggles which remain for men to make.
One of our oldest and greatest poets has furnished me with a line that
well expresses that verdict. Are not William Lloyd Garrison and his
fellow-labourers in that world's work--are they not
'On Fame's eternal bead-roll worthy to be filed?'
* * * * *
IRELAND.
I.
MAYNOOTH GRANT.
HOUSE OF COMMONS, APRIL 16, 1845.
[On April 3rd Sir Robert Peel proposed a Resolution for the improvement
of Maynooth College, the grant to consist of 26,000_l_. per annum.
It was suggested by some speakers, that the act would justify the
endowment of the Roman Catholic priesthood, and Lord John Russell
asserted that such a plan would be a larger, more liberal, and more
statesmanlike measure. Others objected to the grant on theological
grounds, others for the reason that it was a step towards endowing
another Church Establishment in Ireland. The Resolution was carried by
216 to 114. The debate on the Bill was resumed on April 10th, and was
continued on April 14th and 16th. The second reading was carried on the
last day by 323 votes to 176; on May 2nd the Bill passed through
Committee. It was opposed again on bringing up the Report, on May 5th,
and was finally passed on May 21st, by 317 to 184. The Bill, after
opposition, passed in the Lords on June 10th.]
I am anxious to make a few observations on the principle on which I
shall give my vote; because I shall be obliged to pass into the lobby
along with a number of Members of the House from whose principles I
entirely dissent; and after the speech of the noble Lord the Member for
Bandon, I think that any one who votes with him has need to explain why
he votes on his side, for anything more unlike the principles of the
present day, more intolerant, or more insane with respect to the policy
to be pursued towards Ireland, I have never heard; and I could not have
believed that any man coming from that country could have used such
language in addressing this House. I do not think that this question is
to be looked at in a favourable or unfavourable light because of the
party from which it comes. Some hon. Members have charged the right hon.
Baronet with inconsistency, and have in some degree thrown the blame of
his conduct on the measure which he has introduced. The right hon.
Baronet has, from unfortunate circumstances, been connected in
Opposition with a party of such a nature, that he could never promote
any good measure whilst in power without being charged, and justly, with
inconsistent conduct. But I will look at the measure as a measure by
itself, and if it be a good measure I will vote for it as willingly,
coming from the present Government, as if it came from the Government
which preceded it. But I object to this measure on the ground that it is
proposed to vote some of the public taxes for the purpose of maintaining
an institution purely ecclesiastical, and for the rearing and educating
of the priests of a particular sect. I am the more strongly against the
Bill, because, from all that has been said on both sides of the House,
and from all that I can learn from the public papers, and even from the
organs of the Government, I am convinced that there is no argument which
has been used in defence of this measure, which would not be just as
valid for the defence of further measures, not for the payment of
Catholic priests of the College of Maynooth only, but for the payment of
all the priests in Ireland or in England. I admit that the principles
and the arguments which have justified the original vote are good to
some extent to justify this vote. The right hon. Baronet in his opening
speech has stated that the principle was conceded, that it is but a
matter of a few thousand pounds. But if the principle were conceded now,
ten or twenty years hence some Prime Minister might stand up and state
that in 1795 the principle was conceded, and in 1845 that concession--or
rather, that principle--was again sanctioned; and then, arguing from the
two cases, it would be easy to demonstrate that it was no violation of
principle whatever to establish a new Church in Ireland, and add thereby
to the monstrous evils which exist there now from the establishment of
one in connection with the State. The right hon. Baronet has paid no
great compliment to the Irish Catholics in the possession of means and
property, when he has said that the 9,000_l_. now voted is just
sufficient to damp the generosity of the people of that country. If
9,000_l_. were enough in some degree to check their generosity, I
should think that a sum of 26,000_l_. is sufficient to destroy it
altogether. When I consider that the Catholic gentry of Ireland pay no
Income Tax and no Property Tax, and no Assessed Taxes, I do not think it
would be a thing altogether impossible, or to be unlocked for, that they
should have supported an establishment for the rearing of priests to
teach that religion to which they profess to be so much devoted.