[751] Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1908), vol. i, p. 72.
[752] See above, p. 18.
[753] “Along with the gloomy record of the two hundred fifty years of negro slavery we find the history of its abolition; perhaps the most impressive history on record of the origin and completion of a purification of the moral consciousness of peoples.”—Caldecott, English Colonization and Empire (1891), p. 196.
[754] “In Elizabeth’s time Sir John Hawkins initiated the slave trade, and in commemoration of the achievement was allowed to put in his coat of arms ‘a demi-moor, proper bound with a cord’; the honorableness of his action being thus assumed by himself and recognized by Queen and public.”—Spencer, Principles of Ethics (1892), vol. i, p. 468.
[755] By a provision of the Peace of Utrecht (1714) England secured the contract known as the Assiento, which gave English subjects the sole right for thirty years of shipping annually 4800 African slaves to the Spanish colonies in America.
[756] In the Southern colonies the opposition to the further importation of negroes sprang in general from the fear of the insurrection of the slaves, should they become too numerous. The little opposition that existed in some of the Middle States was based almost wholly on economic grounds.
[757] The first abolition paper was established in 1821, but the movement it represented soon died out. The movement started anew with the appearance of The Liberator in 1831. See Albert Bushnell Hart, Slavery and Abolition (1906), pp. 173 ff.
[758] “When Garrison began his work, he thought nothing was more like the spirit of Christ ... than to bring a whole race of people out of sin and debasement, ... but he soon found that neither minister nor church anywhere in the lower South continued to protest against slavery; that the cloth in the North was arrayed against him, and that many northern divines entered the lists against abolition, especially Moses Stuart, Professor of Hebrew in Andover Theological Seminary, who justified slavery from the New Testament; President Lord of Dartmouth College, who held that slavery was an institution of God, according to natural law; and Hopkins, Episcopal bishop of Vermont, who came forward as a thick and thin defender of slavery. The positive opposition of churches soon followed” (Albert Bushnell Hart, Slavery and Abolition (1906), p. 211). In 1832 took place the secession of students from Lane Seminary, Cincinnati, because the trustees and Dr. Lyman Beecher had forbidden them to discuss the slavery question. Four fifths of the student body withdrew.
[759] Cf. Henderson, Dependents, Defectives, and Delinquents (1893); Zebulon R. Brockway, Fifty Years of Prison Service (1912).
[760] The New York Nation of March 19, 1908, p. 254.