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Countless Clarksons and innumerable Wilberforces, without political machinery or public fame, worked at death-beds and confessionals in all the villages of Europe; and the vast system of slavery vanished. It was probably the widest work ever done which was voluntary on both sides; and the Middle Ages was in this and other things the age of volunteers.
Charles Lamb, probably from his friends, the Clarksons, or from Bernard Barton, became acquainted with it, and on more than one occasion, in his letters and Essays of Elia, refers to it with warm commendation. Edward Irving pronounced it a godsend.
There are a perfect host of Clarksons and Wilberforces* risen up among us on that subject, most edifying to hear and behold. Trading negroes from Africa, dear reader, is so horrid! It is not to be thought of! But trading them from Kentucky, that's quite another thing! The Quaker Settlement A quiet scene now rises before us.
As these were the same natives or members of the same tribes, that had murdered one if not both the young Clarksons, I determined to be very guarded in my dealings with them. The men endeavoured to force their way into the camp several times. I somewhat more forcibly repelled them with a stick, which made them very angry.
This was my first visit to the land of Wilberforces and Clarksons of the seventeenth century, whose devotion and fidelity to liberty abolished African slavery in Britain's dominion and created the sentiment that found expression in the immortal utterance of Judge Mansfield's decision: "Slaves cannot breathe in England; upon touch of its soil they stand forth redeemed and regenerated by the genius of universal liberty."
Benevolence springs from the best qualities of the mind and heart. Its divine spirit elevates the benefactors of the world the Howards, Clarksons, and Naviers to the highest pedestals of moral genius and of national worship. The same feeling pervades our common humanity.
"You forget, dear, what a fate those children have; and yet, since you feel so pitifully towards them, it certainly does not become me to be less charitable;" and the kind-hearted woman wiped furtively the tears of genuine compassion which she had been shedding over the sorrows of the Clarksons, and never thought of defending herself from her sister's blame; though, to tell the truth, she had not in her whole nature a single spark of cruelty or uncharitableness, and that Bella knew perfectly well.
In no colony did the setting free of the negroes bring about any of the troubles and turmoils, the lawless outbreaks of blacks against whites, the massacres of the innocents, which had been so long and so often pictured as the inevitable consequences of the legislation demanded by the Clarksons, the Wilberforces, the Buxtons, and the Broughams.
When the question of slavery in the West Indian colonies was under discussion in Parliament, he went farther for abolition than even the professed philanthropists and emancipationists, the Clarksons and the Buxtons, were inclined to go.
"The Clarksons met an unknown woman in the back lane," he said to himself, "THAT is his case! I'll give him a century to find her in a couple of them if he likes. A woman who doesn't exist any longer, and the clothes that gave her her sex burnt up and the ashes thrown away oh, certainly, he'll find HER easy enough!"
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