learned how to thrill at the
suffering of a peasant of Bengal. And even while the trial was going on
a yet wider extension of English sympathy made itself felt. The
hero-seamen of Elizabeth had not blushed to make gain out of kidnapping
negroes and selling them into slavery. One of the profits which England
bought by the triumphs of Marlborough was a right to a monopoly of the
slave-trade between Africa and the Spanish dominions; and it was England
that had planted slavery in her American colonies and her West Indian
islands. Half the wealth of Liverpool, in fact, was drawn from the
traffic of its merchants in human flesh. The horrors and iniquity of the
trade, the ruin and degradation of Africa which it brought about, the
oppression of the negro himself, had till now moved no pity among
Englishmen. But as the spirit of humanity told on the people this apathy
suddenly disappeared. Philanthropy allied itself with the new religious
movement in an attack on the slave-trade. At the close of the American
war its evils began to be felt so widely and deeply that the question
forced itself into politics. "After a conversation in the open air at
the root of an old tree, just above the steep descent into the Vale of
Keston," with the younger Pitt, his friend, William Wilberforce, whose
position as a representative of the evangelical party gave weight to his
advocacy of such a cause, resolved to bring in a bill for the abolition
of the slave-trade. The bill which he brought forward in 1788 fell
before the opposition of the Liverpool slave merchants and the general
indifference of the House of Commons. But the movement gathered fresh
strength in the country with every year; in spite of the absorption of
England in the struggle with the French Revolution, it succeeded at last
in forcing on Parliament the abolition of the traffic in slaves; and
this abolition was followed a few years later by the abolition of
slavery itself.

[Sidenote: English manufactures.]

Time was to show how wide were the issues to which this religious
developement and the sentiment of humanity which it generated were to
tend. But at the moment they told less directly and immediately on the
political and social life of England than an industrial revolution which
accompanied them. Though England already stood in the first rank of
commercial states at the accession of George the Third, her industrial
life at home was mainly agricultural. The growth of her manuf