'The Slave Trade of East Africa.' [‎8] (17/108)

8
clerk had ? by unflinching industry and toil, proved himself on a
par ? if not superior, in one main branch of English law, to some
of our most eminent judges of that period; such at least is the
dictum of the late Sir James Stephen. One hundred years have
passed away, a century whose chief characteristics tell of war
and bloodshed, ambition and its punishment; in bright
contrast stands out the monument which records the history
of the abolition of the Slave Trade. To Granville Sharpe
belongs the honour of having first aroused in the English
mind a sense of the enjoyment of a freedom so perfect, so
ennobling, so gracious, as to cover and enfranchise all who
share with Englishmen the privilege of treading English soil.
When, in the mercy of God to Africa, a few earnest men were
found whose hearts bled for her wrongs, and whose hands were
strong to redress those wrongs, foremost as leaders stood
Granville Sharpe, Clarkson, and William Wilberforce. To the
first was committed the presidency The name given to each of the three divisions of the territory of the East India Company, and later the British Raj, on the Indian subcontinent. of the Society formed for
the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and to Wilberforce was
assigned the general superintendence and Parliamentary man
agement of the cause. The century whose commencement
we have marked has passed away, and we witness the result
of these men's labours ; truly they have laboured, and we have
entered into their labours. They contemplated but the over
throw of a gigantic evil, the curse of Africa's sons ; we see that
curse removed, and in place of the slaver and the slave
barracoon, looking from the very spot where John Newton
lamented his captivity in the service of Satan, we see a
Freetown, many of whose inhabitants, once slaves, or the
children of slaves, are now free men in Christ Jesus. Nay more,
we see the Gospel carried into the old haunts of the slavers;
and as the sailor makes for the bar of Lagos, that last hold of
the slave trade, his landmark for the harbour is the tower of an
English church, one of three erected there by the Church
Missionary Society. Still further on we find a native Christian
church in Abeokuta, and at various places on the Niger, native
churches, their spiritual father himself once a slave, now a
bishop of our own Church. The close of the century is
fairly marked by the comment of the Pall Mall Gazette on the