our Christian obligations by communicating the
inestimable benefits of our religion to the slaves in our colonies, and
that the belief among the early English planters, that if you made a man
a Christian you could not keep him a slave, had led them to the
monstrous conclusion that they ought not to impart Christianity to their
slaves. Its extinction was a consummation devoutly to be desired, and in
good earnest to be forwarded, but immediate and unconditioned
emancipation, without a previous advance in character, must place the
negro in a state where he would be his own worst enemy, and so must
crown all the wrongs already done to him by cutting off the last hope of
rising to a higher level in social existence. At some later period of
his life Mr. Gladstone read a corrected report of his first speech, and
found its tone much less than satisfactory. 'But of course,' he adds,
'allowance must be made for the enormous and most blessed change of
opinion since that day on the subject of negro slavery. I must say,
however, that even before this time I had come to entertain little or no
confidence in the proceedings of the resident agents in the West
Indies.' 'I can now see plainly enough,' he said sixty years later, 'the
sad defects, the real illiberalism of my opinions on that subject. Yet
they were not illiberal as compared with the ideas of the times, and as
declared in parliament in 1833 they obtained the commendation of the
liberal leaders.'

COMMON OPINIONS ON SLAVERY

It is fair to remember that Pitt, Fox, Grenville, and Grey, while eager
to bring the slave trade to an instant end, habitually disclaimed as a
calumny any intention of emancipating the blacks on the sugar islands.
In 1807, when the foul blot of the trade was abolished, even Wilberforce
himself discouraged attempts to abolish slavery, though the noble
philanthropist soon advanced to the full length of his own principles.
Peel in 1833 would have nothing to do with either immediate emancipation
or gradual. Disraeli has put his view on deliberate record that 'the
movement of the middle class for the abolition of slavery was virtuous,
but it was not wise. It was an ignorant movement. The history of the
abolition of slavery by the English, and its consequences, would be a
narrative of ignorance, injustice, blundering, waste, and havoc, not
easily paralleled in the history of mankind.'[59]

A week later Lord Howick proposed to move for pa