Page:Speeches and addresses of H. R. H. the Prince of Wales.djvu/279

 ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY MEETING IN GUILDHALL. 257

family he should not be discharging his duty towards them if he did not recommend the sacred principles of freedom by every means in his power.' Most heartily and most cordially do I endorse his words. " I rejoice that we have on the platform the eminent sons of two eminent fathers in the work of abolishing the Slave-trade and Slavery. Lord Derby and Mr. Forster, whom I rejoice to see here, have a hereditary connection with emancipation. The late Lord Derby, then Mr. Stanley, was Colonial Secretary to the Liberal Government of that day, which had set before it the task of carrying through Parliament a measure which was to put a term to Slavery in all the dependencies of the United Kingdom. Mr. Forster's father, having taken his full share of the agitation which led to the abolition of colonial Slavery, went to Tennessee on an Anti-Slavery errand and died in that State. There are glimpses, ladies and gentlemen, in Mr. Trevelyan's ' Life of Macaulay,' of the devotion with which this great movement was carried on. Zachary Macaulay, father of our great historian, was one of the chief workers in the cause, and it is said of him that for forty years he was ever burdened with the thought that he was called upon to wage war with this gigantic evil. In some of the West India islands the apprentice- ship system produced worse evils than the servitude of the Slave. The negroes w r ere theoretically free, but practically Slaves. The masters had been paid for their emancipation, but still held them to service. In a year or two the term of appren- ticeship was shortened, and soon afterwards public opinion at home demanded and effected its complete abolition. There were four years of disappointment, trouble, dispute, and suffer- ing in all the West Indies, except the island of Antigua, where the planters had preferred to make the change from Slavery to freedom at a single step. Full emancipation of the colonies had to be enforced in 1838 by another Act, which abolished the transition stage, and proclaimed universal and complete emanci- pation. This Act only completed the work which 1833 began. The battle in which so many noble spirits had been engaged was practically won when the name of Slavery was abolished. The negroes of the West Indies look back to the 1st August, 1834, as the birthday of their race. The Emancipation Act,