igs, to whom they were indebted for the repeal of the Test and
Corporation Acts--barbarous laws--which had ostracised intelligent and
conscientious Dissenters from all parochial and municipal and
Parliamentary life. When I was a boy no one could be a parish constable
without going through the hideous farce of taking the Sacrament at his
Parish Church. It was the Dissenters who created the public opinion
which enabled Sir Robert Peel and the Iron Duke to grant Roman Catholic
emancipation. It was they who carried reform and abolished rotten
boroughs, and gave Manchester and Sheffield and Birmingham the
representatives which the Tories, and especially the parsons, would have
denied them. To be a reformer was held by the clergy and gentry to be a
rogue and rascal of the first rank. I cannot call to mind any public
action taken in support of the suffering and the poor to which the clergy
and the gentry in our village, or in any of the villages round, lent any
support whatever. As regards the great Anti-Slavery agitation, for
instance, the only meeting on the subject was held in our chapel, where a
Captain Pilkington came down from London to lecture, and touched all our
hearts as he showed the lash and the chains, and the other instruments of
torture which that cruel system sanctioned and required, and you may be
quite sure that when next day I, with boyish pride, pardonable under the
circumstances, was sent round to get signatures for a petition to
Parliament on the subject, it was not long before I got my paper filled.
Naturally the Dissenters were active in the work, for had not one of
their number--poor Smith, missionary at Demerara--been foully murdered by
Demerara magistrates and planters because he took the part of the black
slave against his white owner and tyrant? Yet I was disgusted, after
remembering the effect produced in our Suffolk village by the captain's
eloquence, to read thirty years after in Sir George Stephens's
"Anti-Slavery Recollections," that "Pilkington was a pleasing lecturer,
and won over many by his amiable manners, but that he wanted power, and
resigned the duty in about six months." In our simple village it was
enough for us that a lecturer or speaker came from London; or as the
country people called it Lunnen. That was a sufficient guarantee for us
of his talent, his respectability, and his power. Since then the scales
have fallen even from the eyes of the rustic, and he no longer sees me