the vindication of their father's memory.--But it had never been
attacked. They affect to suppose such an attack, that they may have a
pretext for inflicting a wound in a fictitious and almost a fraudulent
defence.--But if it had been ever so rudely attacked, the letters are no
defence. For the only possible pretence of attack was the notion of
Thomas Clarkson having assumed the priority, and these letters can have
no earthly relation to that point. Whether Wilberforce, or Clarkson, or
neither of them, first began the abolition struggle, is a question as
utterly wide of the subscription as any one private matter in the life
of either party can be of any one public transaction in which both were
engaged.

The indignation of mankind was awakened by this disgraceful proceeding,
and it was in vain that the friends of the Wilberforces urged, as some
extenuation of their offence, the zeal which they naturally cherished
for the memory of their parent. Men of reflection felt that no
well-regulated mind can ever engage in slandering one person for the
purpose of elevating another. Men of ordinary discernment perceived that
the assaults on Clarkson's reputation had no possible tendency to raise
Wilberforce's reputation. Men of observation saw at once that there
lurked behind the wish to praise the one party, a desire to wound the
other; and gave them far less credit for over-anxiety to gratify their
filial affections than eagerness to indulge their hostile feelings. It
was plain, too, that they sought this gratification at the hazard of
bringing a stain upon the memory of their father; for what could be more
natural than the suspicion that they had obtained from him the materials
out of which their web of detraction was woven? And what more
discreditable to the author of the affectionate and familiar letters of
Wilberforce to Clarkson than their discrepancy with the charges now
urged against him? It is due to the memory of this venerable man, now