Page:Robert Barr - Lord Stranleigh Philanthropist.djvu/252

 With compressed lips the young man read the lurid, soul-chilling narrative that followed. By an unexampled stroke of enterprise this journal had been enabled to ferret out a slave colony in the very centre, as one might say, of free England; the land that had poured out blood and treasure to suppress the slave traffic in distant lands; the country that had given birth to Wilberforce, to John Bright, to Gladstone, and so forth, and so forth; the land of a thousand pulpits, where every Sabbath day the blessings of peace and freedom were prayed for. Yet in this land, and in an isolated portion of its largest county, nearly five hundred men toiled incessantly, day in and day out, far removed from any civilising influence. Thirty miles from a school or a church, living first in tents, and later in a compound built by their own seared hands, could be found slaves working under the hypocritical designation of contract labour. Ancient tortures that England shuddered under the very remembrance of had been reintroduced, in order to quell rebellion in the souls of white men doomed to bondage. And all for what? For the further enrichment of Lord Stranleigh, already computed to be the wealthiest man in the British Empire; a man who never in his life had done a day's useful