Various - Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 342, April, 1844

"Gracious Heaven!" exclaimed the bewildered Antonio, half suspecting the truth, "who was that daring youth?"

After a pause, and in tones broken and inarticulate, his father answered—"Thy twin brother, Antonio! When a child he was stolen from me by some Turks in Candia; and those who stole have given him their own daring and heroic nature, for they are great and rising, while Venice and her sons are falling and degenerate. Oh Ercole! my dear and long-lost son—seen but a moment and then lost for ever!" ejaculated the bereaved father, as, refusing all comfort, he folded his cloak over his face and wept bitterly.

NOTE.—Shortly after these events, Venice, urged at last beyond all endurance, took up arms against Austria on account of the protection afforded by the latter power to the Uzcoques. The pirate vessels were burned, Segna besieged and taken, the Uzcoques slain or dispersed. The quarrel between Austria and the republic was put an end to by the mediation of Spain shortly before the breaking out of the Thirty Years' War.

"Ces misérables," says a distinguished French writer, speaking of the Uzcoques, "fûrent bien plus criminels par la faute des puissances, que par l'instinct de leur propre nature. Les Vénétiens les aigrirent; l'église Romaine préféra de les persécuter au devoir de les éclaircir; la maison d'Autriche en fit les instruments de sa politique, et quand le philosophe examine leur histoire il ne voit pas que les Uscoques soient les seuls criminels."

The extraordinary change which took place in the public mind in the beginning of the century on the subject of the slave-trade, unquestionably justified the determination of Government to abolish a traffic contradictory to every principle of Christianity. It had taken twenty years to obtain this victory of justice. But we must exonerate the mind of England from the charge of abetting this guilty traffic in human misery. The nation had been almost wholly ignorant of its nature. Of course, that Africans were shipped for the West Indies was known; that, as slaves, they were liable to the severities of labour, or the temper of masters, was also known; but in a country like England, where every man is occupied with the concerns of public or private life, and where the struggle for competence, if not for existence, is often of the most trying order, great evils may occur in the distant dependencies of the crown without receiving general notice from the nation. It seems to have been one of the singular results of the war with America, that the calamities of the slave-trade should have been originally brought to the knowledge of the people. The loss of our colonies on the mainland, naturally directed public attention to the increased importance of the West Indian colonies. A large proportion of our supplies for the war had been drawn from those islands; they had become the station of powerful fleets during the latter portion of the war; large garrisons were placed in them; the intercourse became enlarged from a merely commercial connexion with our ports, to a governmental connection with the empire; and the whole machinery of the West Indian social system was brought before the eye of England.

The result was the exposure of the cruelties which slavery entails, and the growing resolution to clear the country of the stigma, and the benevolent desire to relieve a race of beings, who, however differing in colour and clime from ourselves, were sons of the same common blood, and objects of the same Divine mercy. The exertions of Wilberforce, and the intelligent and benevolent men whom he associated with himself in this great cause, were at last successful; and he gained for the British the noblest triumph ever gained for a nation over its own habits, its selfishness, its pride, and its popular opinion.

But the manner in which this great redemption of national character was effected, did less honour to the wisdom of the cabinet than to the benevolence of the people. Fox, probably sincere, but certainly headlong, rushed into emancipation as he had rushed into every measure that bore the name of popularity. Impatient of the delay which might take the honour of this crowning act out of the hands of his party—and unquestionably, in any shape, it was an honour to any party—he hurried it forward without securing the concert, or compelling the acquiescence, of any one of the European kingdoms engaged in the slave-trade. It is true that England was then at war with them all; but there was thus only the stronger opportunity of pronouncing the national resolve, never to tolerate the commerce in slaves, and never to receive any country into our protection by which that most infamous of all trades was tolerated. The opportunity was amply given for establishing the principle, in the necessity which every kingdom in succession felt for the aid of England, and the abolition ought to have been the first article of the treaty. But the occasion was thrown away.

The parliamentary regulations, which had largely provided for the comfort of the slaves on the passage from Africa, and their protection in the British colonies, could not be extended to the new and tremendous traffic which was engaged in by all the commercial states of Europe and the West. The closing of the British mart of slavery flooded the African shore with desperate dealers in the flesh and blood of man; whose only object was profit, and who regarded the miseries of the African only as they affected his sale. The ships which, by the British regulations, had been suffered to carry only a number limited to their accommodation, were now crowded with wretches, stowed in spaces that scarcely allowed them to breathe. The cheapness of the living cargo, produced by the withdrawal of the British from the slave coast, excited the activity, almost the fury, of the trade; and probably 100,000 miserable beings were thus annually dragged from their own country, to undergo the labour of brutes, and die the death of brutes in the Western World.

Another source of evil was added to the original crime. The colonial possessions of Spain had been broken up into republics, and those were all slave-dealers. The great colony of Portugal, Brazil, had rushed into this frightful commerce with the feverish avidity of avarice set free from all its old restrictions. North America, coquetting with philanthropy, and nominally abjuring the principle of slavery, suffered herself to undergo the corruption of the practice for the temptation of the lucre, and the Atlantic was covered with slave-ships.

But rash, ill considered, and unfortunate as was the precipitate measure of Fox, we shall never but rejoice at the abolition of the slave-trade by our country. If England had stood alone for ever in that abolition, it would be a national glory. To have cast that commerce from her at all apparent loss, was the noblest of national gains; and it may be only when higher knowledge shall be given to man, of the causes which have protected the empire through the struggles of war and the trials of peace, that we may know the full virtue of that most national and magnanimous achievement of charity to man.

It is only in the spirit of this principle that the legislature has followed up those early exertions, by the purchase of the final freedom of the slave, by the astonishing donative of twenty millions sterling, the largest sum ever given for the purposes of humanity. It is only in the same spirit that our cabinet continues to press upon the commercial states the right of search, a right which we solicit on the simple ground of humanity; and which, though it cannot be our duty to enforce at the hazard of hostility, must never be abandoned where we can succeed by the representations of reason, justice, and religion.