investigation and in the organization of the movement against slavery
while the other was the parliamentary champion of the cause. For
years, assisted by such debaters as Burke, Fox, and the younger Pitt,
Wilberforce worked until on March 25, 1807, the bill for the abolition
of the slave-trade received the royal assent, and still later until
slavery itself was abolished in the English dominions (1833).

This high thought in England necessarily found some reflection in
America, where the logic of the position of the patriots frequently
forced them to take up the cause of the slave. As early as 1751 Benjamin
Franklin, in his _Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind_,
pointed out the evil effects of slavery upon population and the
production of wealth; and in 1761 James Otis, in his argument against
the Writs of Assistance, spoke so vigorously of the rights of black men
as to leave no doubt as to his own position. To Patrick Henry slavery
was a practice "totally repugnant to the first impressions of right and
wrong," and in 1777 he was interested in a plan for gradual emancipation
received from his friend, Robert Pleasants. Washington desired nothing
more than "to see some plan adopted by which slavery might be abolished
by law"; while Joel Barlow in his _Columbiad_ gave significant warning
to Columbia of the ills that she was heaping up for herself.

Two of the expressions of sentiment of the day, by reason of their deep
yearning and philosophic calm, somehow stand apart from others. Thomas
Jefferson in his _Notes on Virginia_ wrote: "The whole commerce between
master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous
passions; the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading
submission on the other.... The man must be a prodigy who can retain his
manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.... I tremble for my
country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice can not sleep