arassed, oppressed,
tormented, and stinted, both as regarded bodily food, and spiritual
instruction--whether the colonies should be peopled with tyrants and
barbarians, or inhabited by civilized and improving christian
communities--was one calculated to put in action all the best principles
of our nature, and to move all the noblest feelings of the human heart.

Thomas Clarkson, as far as his means extended, aided this great
excitement. He renewed his committees of correspondence all over the
country; aided by the Society of Friends, his early and steady
coadjutors in this pious work, he recommenced the epistolary intercourse
with the provinces, held for so many hopeless years on the Slave Trade,
but now made far more promising by the victory which had been obtained,
and by the unanimity with which all Abolitionists now were resolved to
procure emancipation. He also recommenced his journeys through the
different parts of the island, and visited in succession part of
Scotland, almost all England, and the whole of Wales, encouraging and
interesting the friends of humanity wherever he went, and forming local
societies and committees for furthering the common object.

But it was, after all, in Parliament that the battle must be fought; and
Mr. Buxton, of whose invaluable services in the House of Commons the
cause has lately been deprived, repeatedly, with the support of Messrs.
Wilberforce, William Smith, Brougham, Lushington, and others, urged the
necessity of interference upon the representatives of a people unanimous
in demanding it; and he repeatedly urged it in vain. The Government
always leaned towards the planter, and the most flimsy excuses were
constantly given for preferring to the effectual measures propounded by
the Abolitionists, the most flimsy of expedients, useless for any one
purpose, save that of making pretences and gaining time.

At length came the great case of the missionary Smith's persecution,
trial, and untimely death, when all the forms of judicature had been
prostituted, all the rules of law broken, all the principles of justice
outraged, by men assuming to sit in judgment as a court of criminal
jurisprudence; and though assisted by legal functionaries, exhibiting
such a spectacle of daring violation of the most received and best known
canons of procedure, as no civilized community ever before were called
upon to endure. This subject was immediately brought before Parliament
by Mr. Brougham, and