When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  The self-denying ordinance cracks here. Wilberforce has been making a practical case against the slave trade, painstakingly rebutting each case that had been made for its retention. But it is impossible to make a case about the forced bondage of a human being and his trafficking in servitude without mustering some passion. This was a campaign to which Wilberforce had devoted his adult life. Some of his evangelical fervour was bound to get into the speech. Perhaps if he had crafted the speech properly in advance he might have excised all passion in favour of pragmatism. Speaking extempore, the truth barges in.

  The evidence that had been collected by his friend Thomas Clarkson for the Privy Council inquiry was harrowing. Here Wilberforce makes an appeal to common humanity to consider the appallingly wretched conditions the slaves had to endure. Note, though, that he is once again, even at the moment of high emotion, not condemning the status of the slave: a slave is still living at the mercy of others even if he is kept in hospitable conditions. The true, deep horror of the institution is the lack of liberty. Disgusting conditions are an added insult, but the real injury to the self is to be unfree. Indeed, that was the case usually made by the campaigners. Josiah Wedgwood had created an image, one of the prototype logos and mottos, which depicted a kneeling slave above the rhetorical question ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’ That phrase might have been a good addition here, but Wilberforce instead avoids sinking into the philosophical argument. Even at his most impassioned his target is a subsidiary position rather than the horror itself. Even at the height of his revulsion he is holding himself back. This passage is emotional at the level of rhetorical performance but still disciplined at the level of content.

  I have in my hand the extract from a pamphlet which states in very dreadful colours what thousands and tens of thousands will be ruined; how our wealth will be impaired; one third of our commerce cut off for ever; how our manufactures will drop in consequence, our land-tax will be raised, our marine destroyed, while France, our natural enemy and rival, will strengthen herself by our weakness … There is one other argument, in my opinion a very weak and absurd one, which many persons, however, have much dwelt upon. I mean that, if we relinquish the slave trade, France will take it up. If the slave trade be such as I have described it, and if the House is also convinced of this, if it be in truth both wicked and impolitic, we cannot wish a greater mischief to France than that she should adopt it. For the sake of France, however, and for the sake of humanity, I trust, nay, I am sure, she will not. France is too enlightened a nation to begin pushing a scandalous as well as ruinous traffic, at the very time when England sees her folly and resolves to give it up. It is clearly no argument whatever against the wickedness of the trade, that France will adopt it. For those who argue thus may argue equally that we may rob, murder, and commit any crime, which anyone else would have committed, if we did not. The truth is that by our example we shall produce the contrary effect.

  At the point that Wilberforce suggested that France would be strengthened by Britain’s absence from the slave trade, there was a cry of assent from the back benches. Anti-French feeling was common in Parliament, and Wilberforce is careful to stay just the right side of it by suggesting that Britain (naturally) can be an example to France from a position of moral superiority.

  He pursues at length the argument that abolition would not be calamitous economically. Pointing out that trade revenues would survive the rupture is like a more substantive version of the argument made by some on the Leave team about Britain’s place in the European Union. Wilberforce is well briefed on the tonnage of trade that comes in and out of Liverpool and does not spare his audience much of his learning. There are sections of this speech that are, not to put too fine a point on it, boring. Wilberforce needs to keep the traders on his side, though. Slavery was lucrative and it was not just the fruits of the bonded labour where the rewards lay. Outbound slave ships to Africa were laden with British metal, firearms, textiles and wines, all to be exchanged for human cargo. The ships eventually returned to Britain full of produce from the plantations. This trading network was overseen and approved by Parliament. The City of London’s Corporation, the Bank of England, Lloyd’s insurance and a host of other banking facilities had all thrived on the Atlantic trades.

  Wilberforce was ranged against some serious vested interests. Again, though, he cares too much to be able to sustain a cold demeanour all the way. Emotion breaks in when he points out that the real cost of the trade is human. The lives of both British seamen and traded servants are lost in the unfolding of transactions that are by any measure awful.

  Let us recollect what Europe itself was no longer ago than three or four centuries. What if I should be able to show this House that in a civilized part of Europe, in the time of our Henry VII, there were people who actually sold their own children? What if I should tell them that England itself was that country? What if I should point out to them that the very place where this inhuman traffic was carried on was the city of Bristol? Ireland at that time used to drive a considerable trade in slaves with these neighbouring barbarians; but a great plague having infested the country, the Irish were struck with a panic, suspected (I am sure very properly) that the plague was a punishment sent from Heaven, for the sin of the slave trade, and therefore abolished it. All I ask, therefore, of the people of Bristol is, that they would become as civilized now as Irishmen were four hundred years ago. Let us put an end at once to this inhuman traffic. Let us stop this effusion of human blood. The true way to virtue is by withdrawing from temptation. Let us then withdraw from these wretched Africans those temptations to fraud, violence, cruelty, and injustice, which the slave trade furnishes.

  This is the most withering section in the speech, yet it contains an argument that is in fact curiously crafted for this audience. The passionate conclusion to which it appears to lead – ‘Let us put an end to this inhuman traffic. Let us stop this effusion of human blood’ – lends the speech a title by which it is sometimes now known. This is hugely effective both as description and as an expression of the anguish inflicted, but these should be the closing words. Instead, Wilberforce undercuts their effect with a rider about the beneficial effect abolition would have on the otherwise recidivist Africans.

  Once again the argument is not joined at the level of principle but for its attendant consequences. In this case, ending the slave trade is described as an incentive for better behaviour. The first part of this passage has described a transition from barbarism into civilisation. The daring aspect is that it is the odyssey taken by the people of Bristol, engineered by the Irish. Slavery is therefore the handmaiden of barbarism not on account of the bondage and the indentured labour but because it does not allow a society to give up its appalling habits.

  The complex addition to the argument does, to some extent, lessen the impact of the magnificent moral authority of the best words in the speech. But only to some extent. This is Wilberforce showing how good he is. The balanced symmetry of the famous two sentences adds even more grandeur than is contained in the message. It is hard to resist the claim and hard to resist the call.

  I have one word more to add upon a most material point. But it is a point so self-evident that I shall be extremely short. It will appear from everything which I have said, that it is not regulation, it is not mere palliatives, that can cure this enormous evil. Total abolition is the only possible cure for it … We see then that it is the existence of the slave trade that is the spring of all this internal traffic, and that the remedy cannot be applied without abolition … I trust, therefore, I have shown that upon every ground the total abolition ought to take place. I have urged many things which are not my own leading motives for proposing it, since I have wished to show every description of gentlemen, and particularly the West India planters, who deserve every attention, that the abolition is politic upon their own principles also. Policy, however, sir, is not my principle, and I am not ashamed to say it. There is a principle above everything that is political
; and when I reflect on the command which says, ‘Thou shalt do no murder,’ believing the authority to be divine, how can I dare to set up any reasonings of my own against it? And, sir, when we think of eternity, and of the future consequences of all human conduct, what is there in this life that should make any man contradict the dictates of his conscience, the principles of justice, the laws of religion, and of God. Sir, the nature and all the circumstances of this trade are now laid open to us; we can no longer plead ignorance, we cannot evade it, it is now an object placed before us, we cannot pass it. We may spurn it, we may kick it out of our way, but we cannot turn aside so as to avoid seeing it; for it is brought now so directly before our eyes that this House must decide, and must justify to all the world, and to their own consciences, the rectitude of the grounds and principles of their decision. A society has been established for the abolition of this trade, in which dissenters, Quakers, churchmen, in which the most conscientious of all persuasions have all united, and made a common cause in this great question. Let not Parliament be the only body that is insensible to the principles of national justice. Let us make a reparation to Africa, so far as we can, by establishing a trade upon true commercial principles, and we shall soon find the rectitude of our conduct rewarded by the benefits of a regular and a growing commerce.

  It is always important to end well. The effect of a speech is destroyed by a speaker who mumbles words to the effect that: ‘OK, that’s it, thanks for listening.’ The end needs to be signalled by content and by style. There are two ways to finish. One is with elevation, the other is with pathos, but either way, the audience needs to be prepared, with the progress of the argument and the inflection of the voice, for the approaching conclusion. If Wilberforce had ended here he would have achieved this elementary task of the orator. Indeed, the speech is so loosely structured that the full text contains a number of points at which he gestures towards completion.

  Unfortunately, despite detaining his audience for more than three hours and despite coming to an obvious terminus, he was not done yet. Instead he resumed with ‘I shall now move to several Resolutions’, which were like dry footnotes to his own speech, or a maths homework in which points are awarded for showing working. The Resolutions, which the prime minister had asked Wilberforce to move, concerned the number of slaves annually carried from the coast of Africa and the West Indies in British vessels, the high mortality rate both among British seamen employed in the slave trade and among the transported slaves either in transit or in the harbours of the West Indies, the various restraints on slaves having a family and the high mortality rate of slaves in Jamaica, Barbados and the Leeward Islands. It is all historically fascinating and every word of it should have been saved for one of the parliamentary committees, at which Wilberforce was a renowned master.

  The appendix to the speech was an intellectual error, though the blame attaches to Pitt rather than Wilberforce. Having taken the House to the brink of the conviction that abolition is the natural step, he then complicates the issue with a set of procedural questions. This is poor oratorical technique, but there is a political lesson, which is that a democracy can move but slowly. Wilberforce had won the debate but not yet the issue. In blatant defiance of his request, the House of Commons lost the question in its labyrinthine procedures for a year. The motion was not carried.

  To his credit, Wilberforce did not waver in his commitment to the cause. He brought forward further motions in 1791 and 1792, but with Parliament preoccupied by the war against Napoleon, progress was minimal. The French Revolution ate up the available attention span of politicians and a slave uprising in Saint-Domingue, a French colony in the West Indies, did not help. Progress stalled until the death of Pitt in 1806 and the campaign for the Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Bill. During the vital debate in the House of Commons on 23 February 1806, the speech of the solicitor-general, Sir Samuel Romilly, concluded with a long and emotional tribute to Wilberforce in which he contrasted the peaceful happiness of Wilberforce in his bed with the tortured sleeplessness of the guilty Napoleon Bonaparte. Wilberforce was overcome by Romilly’s tribute. He sat with his head in his hands, tears streaming down his face. As Romilly concluded, the House of Commons rose to give Wilberforce a standing ovation. The slave trade had been abolished.

  Slavery still remained in British colonies, although that story too has a heartening ending. The Emancipation Bill received its final Commons reading on 26 July 1833. Progress can take a long time. There were more than four decades between Wilberforce’s great speech and final success. Mercifully, Wilberforce had lived to witness the event and celebrate it. He died three days later and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

  EMMELINE PANKHURST

  The Laws That Men Have Made

  The Portman Rooms, London

  24 March 1908

  Emmeline Pankhurst’s campaign to win the right for women to vote is a drama about the appropriate method in a parliamentary democracy. The suffragettes were at times violent, and yet the purpose of their radicalism was to be permitted entry to the democratic system. They were the radicals knocking down the door because they wanted to get in. She was the middle-class girl from finishing school who ended up with detectives in plain clothes transcribing her speeches on the pretext of public safety.

  Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928) was born Emmeline Goulden to a Manchester family with a tradition of radical politics. She opens her autobiography, The Making of a Militant, with a story about a bazaar in Manchester to raise funds for emancipated American slaves. Her father Robert Goulden was on the committee that greeted the abolitionist clergyman Henry Ward Beecher when he visited Britain. Henry’s sister Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the young Emmeline’s bedtime reading.

  She was sent to finishing school at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, which provided a full curriculum that was at least as much science as embroidery. In 1879 she married Richard Pankhurst, a lawyer and supporter of the women’s suffrage movement and the author of the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, which allowed women to keep earnings or property acquired before and after marriage. Emmeline was both heartbroken and impoverished when her husband died in 1898. She sold all her books, paintings and furniture and took a job as the registrar of births and deaths in Manchester to make ends meet. She also opened a shop selling silks and cushions in King Street, Manchester. The overburdened mothers whose children she registered in her new occupation were an important influence on Emmeline’s growing sense that the treatment of women was insufferable. In October 1903, persuaded by her daughter Christabel, she helped found the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU).

  The WSPU was the first organisation to be given the title of suffragette, and it soon attracted criticism born of bafflement. Demonstrations, window smashing, arson, cutting telephone lines, interrupting the proceedings in Parliament, damaging Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, throwing yourself under the king’s horse at the Derby and going on hunger strikes was not the behaviour expected of respected bourgeois gentlewomen. Emmeline herself was arrested and imprisoned on numerous occasions. During one incarceration, her hunger strike was ended with violent force-feeding. She ended up living like a fugitive, flitting between friends’ houses when she was not spending time in prison. She was even detained as an undesirable alien at Ellis Island, New York, in 1913, until President Wilson intervened.

  It is telling that so many of the orators in this book – Nehru, Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi – spent time in prison. Ideas are dangerous and the authorities regularly wish to have them silenced. The speech that follows was given five days after Pankhurst was released from jail. The cause of her February 1908 imprisonment was trying to enter Parliament to deliver a resolution of protest to the prime minister. She was released on 19 March and went straight to a suffragette meeting at the Albert Hall to mark the end of ‘Self-Denial Week’, a fundraising initiative in which women had abstained from butter, sugar, meat and sweets. The audience at the Albert Hal
l was not expecting her because she was not due to be released until the following day. Unannounced, Pankhurst walked slowly onto the stage, removed the placard that said ‘Mrs Pankhurst’s chair’ and sat down to a tremendous ovation. ‘It was some time before I could see them for my tears,’ she wrote in her autobiography, My Own Story.

  What I am going to say to you tonight is not new. It is what we have been saying at every street corner, at every by-election during the last 18 months. It is perfectly well known to many members of my audience, but they will not mind if I repeat, for the benefit of those who are here for the first time tonight, those arguments and illustrations with which many of us are so very familiar. In the first place, it is important that women should have the vote in order that in the government of the country the women’s point of view should be put forward. It is important for women that in any legislation that affects women equally with me, those who make the laws should be responsible to women, in order that they may be forced to consult women and learn women’s views when they are contemplating the making or the altering of laws. Very little has been done by legislation for women for many years – for obvious reasons … There are many laws on the statute-book today which are admittedly out of date, and call for reformation: laws which inflict very grave injustices on women. I want to call the attention of women who are here tonight to a few acts on the statute-book which press very hardly and very injuriously on women. Men politicians are in the habit of talking to women as if there were no laws that affect women. ‘The fact is,’ they say, ‘the home is the place for women. Their interests are the rearing and training of children. These are the things that interest women. Politics have nothing to do with these things, and therefore politics do not concern women.’ Yet the laws decide how women are to live in marriage, how their children are to be trained and educated, and what the future of their children is to be. All that is decided by Act of Parliament.