were being freshly raised against the slave trade by Mr. Wilberforce and others. Thus, special notice comes to be made of it in current publications, and the "New Annual Register" under the head of "British and Foreign History," gives condensed reports of the debates to which it gave rise in Parliament.

himself with respect to the truth,"
said, "thumb screws, and other instru-
ments of torture, except the whip and
the stocks" (a considerate exception)
66 were utterly abolished, and he saw
but little of that cruelty which was so
much complained of.
He confessed,
however, that there was room for much
amendment. Missionaries, he said,
should be sent to instruct the slaves in
religion; marriage ought to be encour-
aged, medical societies instituted.
Premiums ought also to be given both
to mothers and fathers of children."

It was not, indeed, for the first time that they were then held, a hundred years ago. "On Monday, the 2nd of April (1792), the House of Commons resolved itself into a committee to consider (again) of the circumstances of the African slave trade." It will be remarked that the subject of debate was not "Slavery." Mr. Wilberforce, who opened it, "disclaimed any design of an immediate emancipation of the negroes. They were far from being in a state for the reception of such an enjoyment. Liberty he considered as the child of reason." These are the reported words of the great philanthropist in beginning his speech. It was the nefarious traffic, the importation of any more negroes from Africa, against which he then pleaded. In support of his plea, "he observed the number of slaves now in Jamaica only was three hundred thousand, while that of the whites was only twenty thousand, and this alarming disparity they wished preposterously to increase." Then he proceeded to expose "the absurd supposition that the trade was a nursery for seamen," quoting authentic documents, pleading also that the abolition of the traffic would not injure commerce, and pressing the consideration (which reads curiously to us now) "that when no more slaves were suf-deavors of the friends of mankind.” fered to be imported, they must be well treated; and by proper treatment they would multiply faster and be better

On the committee dividing, a motion (supported by both Mr. Fox and Mr. Pitt) was carried by a majority of sixtyeight, for a “gradual abolition" of the traffic, and after two or three adjournments, it was proposed that it should cease at the expiration of" eight years.” To this an amendment was moved that it should terminate in a year, and after more debates a compromise was accepted by both parties that it should come to an end in "four." This was carried by a majority of forty.

servants."

The measure, however, met with less favor in the Upper House, several noble lords (including a bishop) urging the expediency of hearing fresh evidence. This was ordered to be heard at the bar, and thus, the registrar adds (this time showing a personal feeling in the matter), "the advocates for the abuses of the slave trade sheltered themselves under the masked battery of form," hoping "that the popular fervor might abate upon the subject, or some fortunate war, or other circumstance, might opportunely occur defeat the hopes and frustrate the en

to

It was not (as we know) till 1807 that a bill for the abolition of the slave trade passed both Houses successfully. In 1824 slave-trading was made a capThe greater part of his speech was, ital offence, mitigated in 1837 to transas might be supposed, devoted to an portation for life. Meanwhile, the exposition of the horrible cruelties" Anti-Slavery Society "" grew up, and seen in the kidnapping and transporta- a motion for the extinction of slavery tion of negroes. Then one member itself in the British dominions was after another defended the existing finally passed, and received the royal state of affairs; and Mr. Vaughan, assent on the 28th of August, 1833. who had visited Jamaica, "to certify As I take down the century-old vol

ume of the "New Annual Register" | they were doing more than correcting
from its shelf and turn over its pages an individually national injustice, or
recording the utterances of men who saw that their movement was a step in
were watching the French Revolution, the change which was differentiating
and still sore at the rejection of British the Old World from the New, and set-
rule by their former American fellow- ting up a then undreamt-of test of the
subjects, this matter of "slave traffic" relationship between one man and an-
seems to separate itself from the other other. The growth of this change is
great questions of the day, and mark now, indeed, producing those phases of
the progress of that human relation- democracy which have taken no final
ship which radically distinguishes the shape, but are bewildering many, and
East from the West, and may, indeed, utilize in their development, often un-
be said to divide the Old World from consciously, the force of political bodies
the New. We may call it the "broth-which are assumed to be antagonistic.
erhood" of man. Its perception, as It is in the debates on the
"slave
Mr. Wilberforce said of liberty, is the trade" in Parliament, which rank
child of reason; it grows slowly, and among discussions whose issues have
can come to its full fruit only after passed away, that I see the germs of
long and patient use of the best facul- that great movement which is changing
ties which we possess. Glimpses, an- the world of men, not in that which
gry, distorted, imperfect, have been professes to be a chronicle of "Prin-
had of it under circumstances of op- cipal Occurrences," and records only
pression, leading to fierce revolutions the murders, shipwrecks, fires, execu-
or hasty legislation which upset the tions, robberies, marriages, battles, and
balance of progress, but the perception births (natural or monstrous), which
of it creeps onwards into light, mark- are common to the future and the past.
ing more and more clearly the distinc-
tion between the old and new order of
social life. There have been some
things common to all conditions of
society in the history of mankind.
Whether nations have been civilized or
savage, men have built and fought,
they have married, and been given in
marriage. But, once upon a time,
there was no state of humanity in
which some section did not claim the
right of possession or supreme com-
mand over another, in the shape of
slavery, serfdom, or some limited form
of essential superiority which excluded
the admission of real brotherhood. It
is in the East that we may now see the
greatest inability to realize it; but once
this blindness was spread over the
whole earth, and affected the West
even after centuries of Christianity.

From The Gentleman's Magazine.
WESSEX PHILOSOPHY.

To add a new province to literature
is no mean achievement, and this Mr.
Hardy has done. The easy course for
the plain man who commences novelist
is to make his tale a tale of one or
two cities already known to geography.
For greater freedom, he may lay his
scene "at the town of in Blank-
shire;" but the streets of that town of
happy endings are deep-worn with the
feet of earlier generations of novelists.
It is a fortunate inspiration which cre-
ates a "local habitation and a name ""
out of the void. The architect of
Thrums may well be proud of his
achievement. The deviser of Barset-
shire, with its pleasant parsonages and
its cathedral city, the scene not of one
but of several stories, stands - mainly
by virtue of that county-almost in
step with the greatest novelists of the
Victorian age. But to create Wessex
was a yet greater task. For Mr. Hardy
has not merely given the world a new

号

province; he has peopled it with a ter to the old faith I was born in. race new to literature.

The agricultural laborer has played but the smallest part in fiction. But in Wessex all the population lives by the land. They have the right savor of the soil. It is a land of villages. Of most of these might be said what Mr. Hardy says of Little Hintock; they are "of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world, where may usually be found more meditation than action, and more listlessness than meditation; where reasoning proceeds on narrow premisses, and results in inferences wildly imaginative." The villagers "belong to that class of society which casts its thoughts into the form of feeling, and its feelings into the form of commotion." Yet it is possible to glean some fragments of philosophy from the felicitous perversions and appropriate absurdities of their conversation.

The two centres of village life are the church and the inn; and round these crystallizes the villagers' philosophy. The combined effect of the two institutions is seen in the immortal Mr. Poorgrass.

Yes; there's this to be said for the Church, a man can belong to the Church and bide in his cheerful old inn, and never trouble or worry his mind about doctrines at all. But to be a meetinger, you must go to chapel in all weathers, and make yerself as frantic as a skit. Not but that chapelmembers be clever chaps enough in their way. They can lift up beautiful prayers out of their own heads, all about their families, and shipwracks in the newspaper.'

666

They can they can,' said Mark Clark, with corroborative feeling; but we Churchmen, you see, must have it all printed aforehand, or, dang it all, we should no more know what to say to a great person like the Lord than babes unborn.'

"Chapel-folk be more hand-inglove with them above than we,' said Joseph thoughtfully.

"Yes,' said Coggan. 'We know well that if anybody goes to heaven, they will. They've worked hard for it, and they deserve to have it, such as 'tis. I'm not such a fool as to pretend that we who stick to the Church have the same chance as they, because we know we have not. But I hate a feller who'll change his old ancient doctrines for the sake of getting to heaven.'"

"Well, I hope Providence won't be in a way with me for my doings,' said Joseph, again sitting down. 'I've been troubled with weak moments lately, 'tis true. I've been drinky once But the attachment of the peasants this month already, and I did not go to to their church does not blind them church a' Sunday, and I dropped a to the imperfections of their pastors. curse or two yesterday; so I don't Mrs. Dewey complains that the new want to go too far for my safety. Your vicar calls at unseasonable hours. Her next world is your next world, and not husband, more tolerant, discusses his to be squandered off-hand.'

666

"I believe ye to be a chapel-member, Joseph. That I do.'

""Oh, no, no! I don't go so far as

that.'

666 'For my part,' said Coggan, 'I'm staunch Church of England.'

666 Ay, and faith, so be I,' said Mark Clark.

sermons :

"His sermon was well enough, a very excellent sermon enough, only he couldn't put it into words and speak it. That's all was the matter wi' the sermon. He hadn't been able to get it past his pen.'

"Well, ay, the sermon might be good enough, for, ye see, the sermon of Old Ecclesiastes himself lay in Old Ecclesiastes' ink-bottle afore he got it out.'

"I won't say much for myself; I don't wish to,' Coggan continued, with that tendency to talk on principles which is a characteristic of the barley- Mellstock village, the home of this corn. 'But I've never changed a acute critic, was, in the matter of single doctrine; I've stuck like a plas- church attendance, a shining example

among the villages of Wessex; a vir- | Wessex beverage. In the West cider tue which it owed chiefly to the attrac-held sway; but elsewhere the favorite tions of the old-fashioned string choir liquor was Casterbridge ale, of which it which, until Parson Maybold displaced was said that "anybody brought up it, exclusively occupied the gallery-a for being drunk and disorderly in the position which commanded a bird's-eye streets of its natal borough had only to view of human frailty. prove that he was a stranger to the place and its liquor to be honorably dismissed by the magistrates, as one overtaken in a fault that no man could guard against who entered the town unawares." It was doubtless this liquor which was the standard in the county, and inspired the indignation Mr. Spinks felt at watered cider, which unhappily was found to be too common. "Such poor liquor,' said Mr. Spinks, makes a man's throat feel very melancholy, and is a disgrace to the name of stimmilent." " It must have been this Casterbridge ale which overcame Mr. Poorgrass upon a memorable occasion. So much was he affected that Gabriel Oak accused him of being as drunk as he could stand :

"The gallery looked down upon and knew the habits of the nave to its remotest peculiarity, and had an extensive stock of exclusive information about it; whilst the nave knew nothing of the gallery people, as gallery people, beyond their loud-sounding minims and chest notes. Such topics as that the clerk was always chewing tobacco except at the moment of crying Amen; that he had a dust-hole in his pew; that during the sermon certain young daughters of the village had left off caring to read anything so mild as the marriage service for some years, and now regularly studied the one which chronologically follows it; that a pair of lovers touched fingers through a knot-hole between their pews in the manner ordained by their great exemplars, Pyramus and Thisbe; that Mrs. Ledlow, the farmer's wife, counted her money and reckoned her week's marketing expenses during the first lesson - all news to those below- were stale subjects here.”

From the church to the public-house is a natural transition in the villages. The inn, indeed, has entered into the whole life of the people. In Tess's time even the off-license had become so accustomed as to lead to a recognized modification of social habits; and it was in the bedroom at Rolliver's that the villagers, who found it too laborious a task to reach the fully licensed house, the Pure Drop, assembled —"being a few private friends asked in to-night to keep up club-walking at my own expense. But Tess lived a generation later than the other heroines of Wessex. In earlier times it was only at the inn that the peasants "sought beatitude," and, like John Darbeyfield, endeavored "to get up their strength." The attempt was excusable before the days of the seven men of Preston, on account of the peculiar potency of the

"No, Shepherd Oak, no! Listen to reason, shepherd. All that's the matter with me is the affliction called a multiplying eye, and that's how it is I look double to you—I mean you look double to me.'

666

'A multiplying eye is a very bad thing,' said Mark Clark.

"It always comes on when I have been in a public-house a little time,' said Joseph Poorgrass meekly. 'Yes; I see two of every sort, as if I were some holy man living in the time of King Noah and entering into the ark. Y-y-y-yes,' he added, becoming much affected by the picture of himself as a person thrown away, and shedding tears; 'I feel too good for England; I ought to have lived in Genesis by rights, like the other men of sacrifice, and then I shouldn't have b-b-been called a d-d-drunkard in such a way!'

"I wish you'd show yourself a man of spirit, and not sit whining there! "Show myself a man of spirit?

Ah, well! let me take the name of drunkard humbly-let me be a man of contrite knees - let it be! I know that I always do say "Please God" afore I do anything, from my getting

up to my going down of the same, and | word of sin" to a bare poor initial.

I am willing to take as much disgrace as there is in that holy act. Hah, yes! But not a man of spirit? Have

He

Henchard, the mayor of Casterbridge, found the abbreviation detestable. exhorted the witness to "out with the I ever allowed the toe of pride to be word like a man," or leave it out altolifted against my person without groan-gether; yet it is to be feared that so ing manfully that I question the right must have vanished the point of old to do so? I inquire that query boldly!' conversation as of a modern play. It "We can't say that you have, Jo- was a small matter; for the virtue of seph Poorgrass,' said Jan emphatically. abstinence from speech — not "Never have I allowed such treat- flashes of silence, like Macaulay's ment to pass unquestioned! Yet the but silence profound and unbroken on shepherd says in the face of that rich all subjects—was deeply appreciated testimony that I am not a man of Under the Greenwood Tree. spirit! Well, let it pass by, and death is a kind friend!'"'

66

666

The native of Wessex boasted a very talented constitution," and even Casterbridge ale did not permanently affect him. Very different, indeed, from the morning headache of the town toper was the recollection of that ale, now extinct, lost in the multitude of modern hop substitutes. "So I used to eat a lot of salt fish afore going,' said Mr. Coggan once, in recollection of his courtship, and then by the time I got there I were as dry as a limekiln so thorough dry that that ale would slip down-ah, 'twould slip down sweet! Happy times! heavenly times! Such lovely drinks as I used to have at that house."" Coggan was a connoisseur of intoxication.

6

666 For

a drunk of a really noble class,' he continued, that brought you no nearer the dark man than you were afore you begun, there was none like those in Farmer Everdene's kitchen. Not a single damn allowed; no, not a bare poor one, even at the most cheerful moment when all were blindest, though the good old word of sin thrown in here and there at such times is a great relief to a merry soul !'

"True,' said the maltster. 'Nature requires her swearing at regular times, or she's not herself; and unholy exclamations is a necessity of life.'"

This, doubtless, is the root of the matter; the basis of the whole philosophy of expletives. Yet, even in Wessex, modern squeamishness was invading; so that the policeman in the witness-box reduced the "good old

mere

"Yes; Geoffry Day is a clever man if ever there was one. Never says anything, not he !'

666

Never.'

"You might live wi' that man, my sounies, a hundred years and never know there was anything in him.'

666

Ay; one o' those up-country Loudon ink-bottle fellers would call Geoffry a fool.'

"Ye never find out what's in that man; never. Silent ? Ah, he is silent! He can keep silence well. That man's silence is wonderful to listen to !'

"There's so much sense in it. Every moment of it brimming over with sound understanding.'

"A can keep a very clever silence - very clever truly,' echoed Leaf. 'A looks at me as if a' could see my thoughts running round like the works of a clock.'

"Well, all will agree that the man can pause well in conversation, be it a long time or be it a short time.'"

"Danc

For more enlivening diversions than this Carlylean gospel of nothingness, the Wessex folk turned to dancing, music, and those pageants of still life, those universal occasions for the display of emotions which in less acute forms are ever private-weddings, christenings, and funerals. ing,' said Mr. Spinks, 'is a most strengthening, enlivening, and courting movement, especially with a little music added.'" And dance they did; not your formal square dance or your gliding waltz, nor your stage minuets, but the good, honest, and perfectly