riests,
women, and poets, have long given assurance of such results, but the
world, of course, required definite experience and practical essays
before instituting any extensive course of action in that direction.

'A council held in the city of London in 1102, under the presidency
of St. Anselm, interdicted trade in slaves. This was eight hundred
years before the same object was debated in the same city before
Parliament. In 1780, Thomas Clarkson proposed to abolish the slave
trade. In 1787, Wilberforce renewed the proposition. Seven times
presented from 1793 to 1799, the bill seven times failed.
Successively laid over, it triumphed at length in 1806 and 1807.
All the Christian nations followed this memorable example. At the
Congress of Vienna, all the Powers pledged themselves to unite
their efforts to obtain _the entire and final abolition of a
traffic so odious and so loudly reproved by the laws of religion
and nature_. The slave trade was abolished in 1808 by the American
United States; in 1811, by Denmark, Portugal, and Chili; in 1813,
by Sweden; in 1814 and 1815, by Holland; in 1815, by France; in
1822, by Spain. In this same year, 1822, Wilberforce attacked
slavery after the slave trade, and won over public opinion by
appeals and repeated meetings, while his friend Mr. Buxton proposed
emancipation in Parliament. The Emancipation Bill was presented in
1833. On the 1st of August, 1834, slavery ceased to sully the soil
of the English colonies. In 1846, Sweden, in 1847, Denmark,
Uruguay, Wallachia, and Tunis, obeyed the same impulse, which
France followed in 1848, Portugal in 1856, and which Holland
promised to imitate in 1860. An earnest movement agitated Brazil.'

In Poland, the serfdom of the peasants was never sanctioned by law, but
existed in later times by reason of exception and abuse. Stanislas
Leszczynski, King of Poland, in 1720 raised his voice in favor of the
peasant population; the same principles were in 1768 defended, sword in
hand, by the Confederation of Bar, discussed in the diets of 1776, 1780,
1788, and finally adopted by the famous Constituent Assembly of 1791.
Thadeus Kosciuszko (May 7th, 1794), then Dictator of Poland, issued a
document giving entire personal liberty to all serfs; and on the 22d of
January, 1863, the members of the 'National Polish Government' decreed
that the pe