17. Oastler's First Letter on Yorkshire Slavery [The Leeds Mercury, Saturday, October 16, 1830], 1830.
Slavery in Yorkshire.
To the editors of the Leeds Mercury.
"It is the pride of Britain that a Slave cannot exist on her soil; and if I read the genius of her constitution aright, I find that Slavery is most abhorrent to it—that the air which Britons breathe is free—the ground on which they tread is sacred to liberty."
Rev. R.W. Hamilton's Speech at the Meeting held in the Cloth-Hall Yard, Sept. 22nd, 1830.[357]
Gentlemen,—No heart responded with truer accents to the sounds of liberty which were heard in the Leeds Cloth-hall yard, on the 22nd instant, than did mine, and from none could more sincere and earnest prayers arise to the throne of Heaven, that hereafter Slavery might only be known to Britain in the pages of her history. One shade alone obscured my pleasure, arising not from any difference in principle, but from the want of application of the general principle to the whole Empire. The pious and able champions of Negro liberty and Colonial rights should, if I mistake not, have gone farther than they did; or perhaps, to speak more correctly, before they had travelled so far as the West Indies, should, at least for a few moments, have sojourned in our immediate neighbourhood, and have directed the attention of the meeting to scenes of misery, acts of oppression and victims of Slavery, even on the threshold of our homes!
Let the truth speak out, appalling as the statements may appear. The fact is true. Thousands of our fellow-creatures and fellow-subjects, both male and female, the inhabitants of a Yorkshire-town, (Yorkshire now represented in Parliament by the giant of anti-slavery principles,[358]) are at this very moment existing in a state of slavery more horrid than are the victims of that hellish system—"Colonial Slavery." These innocent creatures drawl out unpitied their short but miserable existence, in a place famed for its profession of religious zeal, whose inhabitants are ever foremost in professing "Temperance" and "Reformation," and are striving to outrun their neighbours in Missionary exertions, and would fain send the Bible to the farthest corner of the Globe—aye in the very place where the anti-slavery fever rages most furiously, her apparent charity is not more admired on earth, than her real cruelty is abhorred in heaven. The very streets which receive the droppings of an "Anti-Slavery Society" are every morning wet with the tears of innocent victims at the accursed shrine of avarice, who are compelled (not by the cart-whip of the negro slave-driver) but by the dread of the equally appalling thong or strap of the overlooker, to hasten half-dressed, but not half-fed, to those magazines of British Infantile Slavery—the Worsted Mills in the town and neighbourhood of Bradford!!!
Thousands of little children, both male and female, but principally female, from SEVEN to fourteen years, are daily compelled to labour from six o'clock in the morning to seven in the evening with only—Britons, blush whilst you read it!—with only thirty minutes allowed for eating and recreation.