Justified True Belief

(●) The Member of Parliament who spent forty-six years getting Britain out of the slave trade, and told his own country that its respectable religion was not Christianity. + In the spring of 1789 the British slave trade was carrying tens of thousands of Africans across the Atlantic every year, in ships fitted out at Liverpool and Bristol, insured in London, and defended in Parliament as the nursery of British seamanship, the school that was said to train the navy’s sailors, and as the foundation of the West Indian economy. A small, short-sighted young man who represented Yorkshire stood up in the House of Commons and spoke for three and a half hours against it. He lost that year, and the next year, and for sixteen years after that. Wilberforce matters on a Christian apologetics site for a reason that has little to do with rhetoric. He is the standing test case for the question of whether a conversion changes anything a stranger could measure. He was a wealthy, witty, entirely conventional young politician who could sing well and did nothing much with his seat for four years. Then he came to believe the gospel was true, and thought his way, with a good deal of help, from that belief to a public campaign that cost him his health, most of his leisure and a large share of his income, and ended with an Act of Parliament. He wrote one book. It argued that the religion of most respectable English Christians was not Christianity at all but a kind of decent moral scheme with a Christian vocabulary, and that the difference between the two was the difference between health and disease. His publisher thought five hundred copies was a bold gamble. It sold seven thousand five hundred in half a year.

(●) 1759 AD: Born to a Hull merchant’s money, and in Parliament at twenty-one with nothing much to say for himself. + William Wilberforce was born at Hull on 24 August 1759, the only son of Robert Wilberforce, a partner in the family’s Baltic trading house. He was small, sickly and short-sighted all his life, and he had a voice people remembered. At the town’s grammar school, where Joseph Milner was master, the assistant used to set the boy on a table and make him read aloud as an example to the others. His father died in the summer of 1768, and the eight-year-old was sent to live with his uncle William and aunt Hannah at Wimbledon and in St James’s Place. The household was warmly evangelical, a word that then described Christians who held that a person must be converted and inwardly changed rather than merely christened and respectable, and it was in touch with George Whitefield’s circle. The boy took to it. His mother and grandfather were alarmed, brought him back to Hull, and set about undoing the damage. He described the campaign himself, long afterwards, with no bitterness and complete clarity: "I might almost say, that no pious parent ever laboured more to impress a beloved child with sentiments of piety, than they did to give me a taste for the world and its diversions." It worked. At Pocklington school, and then at St John’s College, Cambridge, from October 1776, he was an idle, popular, well-off young man who sang at parties and played cards. He decided on public life before he left college. Coming of age in August 1780, and only just in time, he stood at Hull in that autumn’s election and took 1,126 votes, exactly as many as the other two candidates, Lord Robert Manners and David Hartley, polled between them. Winning cost him between eight and nine thousand pounds, most of it going out in the customary two guineas a head, a guinea being twenty-one shillings, paid to resident electors once the poll had closed. That was simply how a seat was won in 1780. He came to judge the practice severely once his own principles had changed. In London he fell in with William Pitt the Younger, three months his senior, and the friendship shaped both their careers. In 1784 he stood for Yorkshire itself, the largest and most independent constituency in the kingdom, and won it. James Boswell watched him address the freeholders in the rain at York and told Henry Dundas what he had seen: "I saw what seemed a mere shrimp mount upon the table; but, as I listened, he grew, and grew, until the shrimp became a whale."

(●) 1785 AD: A holiday carriage and a borrowed devotional book brought on what he called the Great Change. + In the autumn of 1784 Wilberforce invited Isaac Milner, his old schoolmaster’s younger brother, to share a carriage to the south of France. Milner was a large, cheerful Cambridge mathematician who happened to hold the evangelical convictions Wilberforce had been taught to laugh at, and the two argued about religion for weeks in the way friends argue when neither expects to win. Just before they left Nice for home in the winter of 1784 to 1785, Wilberforce picked up a small book that had been given to the mother of one of the party, Philip Doddridge’s The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, and asked Milner what he made of it. "It is one of the best books ever written," Milner said, "let us take it with us and read it on our journey." They read it aloud between towns. On a second continental trip the following summer they worked through the Greek New Testament together, and somewhere in that reading the argument stopped being an argument. By the autumn of 1785 he was in misery over his past life, writing in his journal about hours wasted and a heart he could not command. The crisis was practical as well as spiritual. Serious religion, in the England of 1785, was widely thought incompatible with public office, and Wilberforce assumed he would have to leave politics. On Sunday 4 December he carried a letter into the city and left it himself with "old Newton" at his church: John Newton, the former slave-ship captain who had written "Amazing Grace," then rector of St Mary Woolnoth. He begged that the visit be kept secret. The interview followed a few days later, and the old man told him something he had not expected to hear, that God had a use for him where he already stood. Pitt, from an entirely different direction, told him the same. He stayed.

(●) 1787 AD: He wrote in his journal that God had set two objects before him, the slave trade and the manners of the nation. + The journal entry is the sentence he is remembered by, and his sons printed it in their life of him: "God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners." The second phrase needs translating for a modern reader. "Manners" then meant morals and habits, the ordinary conduct of a people, not table etiquette. He was proposing to change what his countrymen thought acceptable. Neither object was his invention, and he never claimed it was. James Ramsay, a naval surgeon turned clergyman who had watched the plantations at close range in St Kitts, had been fighting alone since 1784. Thomas Clarkson had won a Cambridge prize with a Latin essay on the slavery of the human species, published it in English in 1786, and was riding between the ports collecting evidence: manacles, thumbscrews, ships’ muster rolls showing that the trade killed its own sailors faster than it killed anyone else. Lady Middleton and her husband Sir Charles, comptroller of the navy and so the official who ran its civil administration, were pressing the case at Teston in Kent. What the cause lacked was a man inside the House of Commons with the standing to carry it. Wilberforce remembered the moment he agreed to be that man: a conversation with Pitt in the open air "at the root of an old tree at Holwood just above the steep descent into the vale of Keston." For the second object he revived an idea from a century earlier, a society for the reformation of manners, and in 1787 obtained a royal proclamation against vice and immorality with an association of respectable names behind it. He was under no illusion about the size of what he had taken on, or about where it ranked. The older society had taken as its first aim the building up of its own members, which is the higher of the two ambitions, and writing to a friend he granted the point before anyone could make it against him: "that ours is an infinitely inferior aim, yet surely it is of the utmost consequence, and worthy of the labours of a whole life."

(●) 1789 AD: His first abolition speech ran three and a half hours, and then he lost for eighteen years. + On 12 May 1789 he brought twelve resolutions before the House. He had prepared the matter rather than the words, and spoke, as his diary notes, for "three hours and a half." The speech is not a piece of denunciation. It is mostly evidence: the death rate on the Middle Passage, which was the ocean crossing from the African coast to the West Indies, the loss of British seamen, the arithmetic of a ship carrying six or seven hundred people chained in pairs. He refused to make villains of the Liverpool merchants and asked the House to consider what interest does to a man’s eyesight, how it "can draw a film across the eyes, so thick, that total blindness could do no more." Then came the years of losing. Evidence was heard, and heard again, until hearing it became the delay. In April 1791 the abolition motion failed by 88 votes to 163. That February John Wesley, aged eighty-seven and six days from his own death, had written him the last letter he ever wrote, warning that unless God had raised him up for this very thing he would be worn out by the opposition of men and devils, and telling him to go on in the name of God. In 1792 the Commons agreed to abolition in principle and then wrote the word "gradually" into it, which meant never. The French Revolution turned any talk of the rights of man into a suspicion of treason, and a war with France made every reform look like a luxury. The most galling defeat came in March 1796, when a bill that had passed its earlier stages was thrown out on the third reading by 74 votes to 70. His diary records why, and the entry has been quoted ever since with a kind of disbelief: "ten or twelve of those who had supported me absent in the country, or on pleasure. Enough at the Opera to have carried it." His own body was giving way under the work. A collapse in 1788 left him dependent on a small daily dose of opium, which was the standard prescription of the day for the illness that had brought him down. He took it sparingly for the rest of his life, and he believed he owed his survival to it.

(●) 1797 AD: He published a book against comfortable religion in April, and married in May. + He wrote A Practical View in the gaps of a parliamentary session, correcting proofs in committee rooms and building the index after midnight when the debates were over. His publisher Cadell had little faith in it. "You mean to put your name to the work? Then I think we may venture upon 500 copies." The whole printing was gone within days, and five editions, seven thousand five hundred copies, were called for within half a year. Newton wrote to tell him that he deemed it "the most valuable and important publication of the present age, especially as it is yours." Seven weeks later, at Bath, he married Barbara Ann Spooner, the eldest daughter of a Birmingham banker. He had known her a matter of weeks. They had six children in ten years, and the marriage gave him a home that visitors found chaotic, affectionate and full of interruptions. Writing to Hannah More about the peace of a country retreat, he broke off mid-letter: he had been "irresistibly summoned to a contest at marbles." The household stood at Clapham, then a village south of London, where a group of friends had gathered around the banker Henry Thornton’s house at Battersea Rise: Thornton himself, Zachary Macaulay who had worked as a young man on a Jamaican sugar estate and could not be lied to about it, the lawyer James Stephen who had watched a rigged slave trial in Barbados, Granville Sharp, Charles Grant of the East India Company. They lived within walking distance of one another on purpose, and they worked as a committee. A later generation nicknamed them the Clapham Sect. Wilberforce gave away a large share of his income, in some years more than a quarter of it, and the accounts show it went out in small sums to a great many people.

(●) 1807 AD: The Commons abolished the trade by 283 votes to 16, and cheered him where he sat. + The bill of 1807 was carried by strategy as much as by conscience. James Stephen had proposed attacking the trade sideways, through a measure against British merchants supplying foreign colonies, which passed in 1806 without anyone quite noticing that it had cut the ground from under a large part of the traffic. The Abolition Bill itself came to the Commons on 23 February 1807, and the mood in the House had turned. Sir Samuel Romilly, the Solicitor-General, asked the younger members to compare two men going home that night: the Emperor of the French, Napoleon, in all his glory, and the honoured individual who would lay his head on his pillow remembering that the slave trade was no more. The whole House, forgetting its ordinary habits, burst into acclamation. Wilberforce, by his own account, missed it. "I was myself so completely overpowered by my feelings when he touched so beautifully on my domestic reception," he wrote, "that I was insensible to all that was passing around me." The division was 283 to 16. Afterwards, in high spirits, he turned to Henry Thornton and asked what they should abolish next. "The lottery, I think," said Thornton gravely. The Act received the royal assent on 25 March 1807. It ended British trafficking, not slavery, and Wilberforce knew the difference. He spent the next years on enforcement, on the African Institution, and on a second cause that mattered to him almost as much: in 1813, twenty years after his first attempt failed, he carried the clause that opened British India to missionaries and to schools.

(●) 1833 AD: He handed the cause to a younger man, and died three days after hearing that England would pay to end slavery itself. + In 1821, ageing and often ill, he asked Thomas Fowell Buxton to take over the parliamentary leadership of the campaign against slavery itself. In 1823 he published his Appeal to the whole British public and helped found the Anti-Slavery Society. In 1825 he gave up his seat. Five years later he lost most of his fortune standing behind a son’s failed business, sold his house, and spent his last years staying with his children. He came up to London in July 1833 for a few days and was too ill to leave. On the Friday, 26 July, word reached him that the government had made the concessions that would carry emancipation through the Commons, and that the price of it was twenty million pounds of compensation, paid to the slave owners and not to the people they had held. It was an enormous sum, something near two-fifths of the national budget of that year, and it was the last public news he received. He died at three in the morning on Monday 29 July 1833, aged seventy-three. Both Houses asked for him to be buried in Westminster Abbey, and the funeral on Saturday 3 August was attended by the Speaker of the Commons, the Lord Chancellor and a prince of the blood as pall-bearers, with public business suspended. A friend walking down the Strand that morning wrote that every third person going about ordinary business was in mourning. The Act received the royal assent on 28 August 1833, and on the first of August the following year about eight hundred thousand people in the British colonies ceased, in law, to be property, though most were bound to their former owners as apprentices for years after that.

What He Taught

(T1) The slave trade is a national crime, and the guilt belongs to the whole country rather than to the traders alone. + The obvious way to open an attack on the slave trade is to describe a slave ship and let the House recoil. Wilberforce had the material to do it, and he chose a different opening. Before any of the evidence he told the members that he was not there to accuse anybody, because the accusation would have to include himself and every man in the room. Parliament had licensed the trade. Parliament had taken the revenue. The merchants of Liverpool had done in daylight what the law allowed and the country profited by. This is not a debating tactic, though it worked as one, disarming men who had come ready to be attacked. It follows from something he believed about sin: that a shared wrong is not diluted by being shared. A nation that permits an evil owns it, and owning it is the beginning of ending it. The word he reached for in 1823, writing about slavery itself, was the same: "a national crime." The argument also rests on a claim about the people in the hold. Wilberforce never treated the question as one of British humanity toward inferiors. Scripture had already settled what an African is: God "made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth" (Acts 17:26), and the divine image is not distributed by continent (Genesis 1:27). Where he differed from most of his opponents was not in kindness but in taking that seriously enough to legislate on it.

(Q) "I mean not to accuse any one, but to take the shame upon myself, in common, indeed, with the whole parliament of Great Britain, for having suffered this horrid trade to be carried on under their authority." + Source: Speech on the slave trade, House of Commons, 12 May 1789, as reported in William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England, vol. 28, cols 41 to 42. He went straight on: "We are all guilty," and all ought to plead guilty rather than throw the blame on others. He then asked the House not to reflect harshly on the traders themselves, and moved to the evidence.

(T2) A religion of decent opinions and decent conduct is not Christianity. + Picture the readers Wilberforce had in mind, because he had them very precisely in mind. A landowner who goes to church, keeps his word, gives to the parish poor, believes in God and in a general way in the Bible, would be offended to be called an unbeliever, and could not tell you what he thinks the cross accomplished. In 1797 that man was the English religious system, and Wilberforce wrote his book about him. His diagnosis is a single sentence and everything else in the book unpacks it. What such people have lost is not morality but doctrine, and specifically the three doctrines that make Christianity what it is: that human nature is corrupt and not merely imperfect, that Christ made atonement for sin, and that the Holy Spirit changes people from the inside. He calls these the "peculiar" doctrines, an eighteenth-century word for what belongs distinctly to a thing rather than being shared with everything around it. Take them out, and what is left is a code of behaviour with religious wallpaper. His illustration for what then happens is medical. Such a man wants to reform, and knows neither the real nature of his illness nor its remedy, so he treats the surface. "Not being able to raise their practice up to their standard of right, they lower their standard to their practice." Late in the book, turning to the state of religion in the country at large, he refuses to soften it: "We must speak out. Their Christianity is not Christianity. It wants the radical principle." He is not making a party point. His concern is what Jesus made his own in the Gospels, that a person can address him as Lord and not do what he says (Luke 6:46), and it is the question every church in every century must let itself be asked.

(Q) "But the grand radical defect in the practical system of these nominal Christians, is their forgetfulness of all the peculiar doctrines of the Religion which they profess." + Source: A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, chapter IV, section VI (1797 text). The sentence continues by naming the three forgotten doctrines: the corruption of human nature, the atonement of the Saviour, and the sanctifying influence of the Holy Spirit. "Radical" here keeps its root sense, a defect at the root rather than in the branches.

(T3) Christian practice grows out of Christian doctrine, and gratitude is what makes a person useful. + The obvious objection to (T2) is that it puts theology above behaviour, and that a man who spent his life counting votes ought to have known better. Wilberforce’s answer is that the two are not rivals, and that it is precisely the doctrines which produce the behaviour. Think of the difference between a man who has been told to spend less and a man who has just been forgiven a debt he could never have paid. Both may end the week with the same ledger, but only one of them has been given a reason to get up in the morning. A moralist tells you to do better and leaves you where you were. Tell a man instead that his condition was desperate, that the Son of God bore the cost of it, and that God himself now lives in him, and you have given him something that works on him daily. He puts it in the language of a man who knows what motives cost. The doctrines are "an inexhaustible storehouse of instructions and motives." Cold obligation produces "scanty grudged returns of service"; gratitude produces people who think the labours of a whole life an imperfect way of saying thank you. That is the engine he believed had been running under his own forty-six years, and the New Testament describes the same order: salvation is a gift and not a wage (Ephesians 2:8, 2:9), and the faith that receives it is the kind that works through love (Galatians 5:6). There is a warning in this for admirers of his career. Wilberforce is often held up as proof that Christianity is useful, that it produces reformers and hospitals and abolition acts. He would have said that a religion held for its usefulness has already stopped being the thing that was useful. The abolition was a by-product. The book was about the engine.

(Q) "In order to grow in grace, he must also study in the same school; finding in the consideration of the peculiar doctrines of the Gospel, and in the contemplation of the life, and character, and sufferings of our blessed Saviour, the elements of all practical wisdom, and an inexhaustible storehouse of instructions and motives." + Source: A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, chapter IV, section VI (1797 text). "The same school" means the school in which the Christian first learned anything at all, the doctrines just named (T2). His point is that these are not a syllabus a believer graduates from.

(T4) A nation’s habits are public business, and changed habits outlast changed laws. + The second of his two great objects sounds, at first hearing, both smaller and more meddlesome than the first, and it is worth seeing why he did not think so. A law can be passed by a majority that does not believe in it, and repealed by the next. What people find shameful, and what they find fashionable, is harder to shift and lasts far longer. He put it as an aim to make goodness fashionable, and he meant the whole apparatus of respectable opinion: what a landowner considers acceptable in his tenants, what a hostess will tolerate at her table, what a member of Parliament is willing to be seen supporting. Some of what followed from this was small and useful, and some of it was neither. The 1787 proclamation against vice, and the society formed to press it, went after Sunday trading, obscene publications and public swearing, with results that mixed real protection for the vulnerable with real interference in the pleasures of the poor. But the same conviction produced the free schools, the campaign for the ending of the mistreatment of animals, the prison reform and the missionary societies that the Clapham circle poured money into for decades. The strategy is also why the slave trade fell. Wilberforce never had the votes at the start, and he knew he never would until enough people outside the House found the trade disgusting. Clarkson’s evidence, the sugar boycotts, the Wedgwood medallion of a kneeling man asking whether he is not a man and a brother, petitions signed by hundreds of thousands of people: these are the reformation of manners doing the work that the parliamentary arithmetic could not do on its own.

(Q) "God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners." + Source: Journal, 1787, printed in Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce (1838), vol. I, p. 149. His sons print it simply as a journal entry, without a day; the date of 28 October 1787 usually attached to it comes from later biographers. He was twenty-eight, two years into his new convictions, and had not yet given notice of a single motion on the trade.

(T5) Slavery itself, and not only the trade in slaves, is what Britain has to answer for. + The 1807 Act stopped the ships. It left roughly three-quarters of a million people in the British West Indies as legal property, and it rested on a calculation that turned out to be wrong: that planters deprived of fresh imports would have to treat the people they held well enough to keep them alive, and that slavery would wither on its own. It did not wither. By the early 1820s the registration returns Stephen had fought for, the official rolls on which every enslaved person in a colony had to be listed and counted, were showing the population falling year on year, and that is a fact about conditions rather than about climate. So in 1823 Wilberforce published the Appeal, addressed not to Parliament but to every inhabitant of the British Empire who valued the favour of God or the honour of his country, and called them to answer for it at the last judgment. The pamphlet is largely an argument about religion: that the planters had systematically kept Christianity from the people they held, that the working of the estates made the Sabbath impossible, that the same men who feared African witchcraft would not allow the one thing that would have displaced it. What he asked for, and this is where the modern reader will part company with him, was preparation and then emancipation rather than emancipation now. He wanted the enslaved instructed, married, given the protection of law and a settled Sabbath first. Elizabeth Heyrick, a Leicester Quaker, published a pamphlet in 1824 called Immediate, not Gradual Abolition, and history has been kinder to her argument than to his. He lived long enough to hear that his country would pay twenty million pounds to be rid of the thing, and not long enough to see the apprenticeship system that followed prove her right.

(Q) "A system of the grossest injustice, of the most heathenish irreligion and immorality, of the most unprecedented degradation, and unrelenting cruelty." + Source: An Appeal to the Religion, Justice, and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire, in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies (1823), opening pages. His subject is colonial slavery as an institution, not particular cruelties within it. He argues in the same paragraphs that public attention had been drawn too often to individual atrocities and not enough to a system whose evils are "essential and incurable" wherever the power of one person over another is unlimited.

(Q) "Thank God, that I should have lived to witness a day in which England is willing to give twenty millions sterling for the Abolition of Slavery." + Source: Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce (1838), vol. V, in the account of his last days. His sons give the saying without naming who heard it. He said it in London on Friday 26 July 1833, when word came that emancipation would carry. His sons record the news as the bill’s second reading in the Commons that night, though the House had taken the second reading on 22 July and what settled the matter that week were the concessions the government made in committee. He died three days later.

What Came of His Work

(†) Clapham showed the church what a handful of well-placed Christians can do by staying in one place for thirty years. + The most copied thing Wilberforce did was not a speech. It was a method. A dozen or so friends with money, professional skill and access to power settled near one another, pooled their information, divided the labour, and kept at the same objects for decades without any of them being in charge. Macaulay read the colonial newspapers and remembered everything; Stephen drafted the bills; Thornton paid; Hannah More wrote for the readers nobody else was writing for, selling her cheap tracts by the million and opening schools in the Mendip villages; Wilberforce spoke and lobbied and gave the whole thing a face. The list of what came out of that circle is long and much of it outlived the slavery campaign: the Church Missionary Society (1799), the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, the African Institution, the Sierra Leone settlement, the society against cruelty to animals that Wilberforce helped found in 1824, and the missionary clause in the East India charter of 1813. Thomas Fowell Buxton took the leadership in 1821 and carried emancipation home in 1833. Nineteenth-century evangelicals in Britain and America took this as their pattern of Christian citizenship, and the pattern has been criticised from both directions ever since: as too respectable by radicals, who wanted the system pulled down rather than lobbied, and as too political by pietists, meaning Christians who hold that the church’s proper business is the soul and not the statute book. What is not in doubt is that it worked, and that it was built on the conviction stated in (T3), that a changed heart shows up in a committee minute book.

(†) His one book gave English-speaking Christians a plain account of real religion that respectable people would actually read. + Cadell’s five hundred copies were a misjudgment of one of the publishing events of the age. Edmund Burke, dying in the summer it came out, spent much of the last two days of his life reading it, and sent word that if he lived he would thank Wilberforce for having sent such a book into the world. Fifteen English editions had appeared by 1826, twenty-five American editions in the same period, and translations into French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and German. Wilberforce knew exactly what he had aimed at and said so: "I was purposely more diffuse than strict taste prescribed, because my object was to make an impression upon men in general." Its most consequential reader may have been a young Scottish minister with a mathematical bent and no evangelical convictions to speak of. Thomas Chalmers, recovering from serious illness in the winter of 1810 to 1811, read A Practical View and found himself, in his own phrase, on the eve of a great revolution in all his opinions about Christianity. He became the dominant figure of the Scottish church in the next generation, the founder of its urban parish mission and eventually the leader of the Free Church. The book still does the work it was written for. Its charge is that a Christianity kept for its social usefulness has already lost the thing that made it useful, and that charge lands on comfortable religion in any century, which is why the book keeps being reprinted, often under the shorter title Real Christianity.

(†) He preached contentment to the English poor, and helped make it a crime for them to combine for better wages. + The honest column of the account is not about how later readers used his books. It is about what he himself wrote and how he himself voted, in the same years he was fighting for people in the West Indies. - What he taught the poor. In A Practical View, in the chapter arguing that real religion is good for a nation’s political life, he describes Christianity rectifying the characteristic fault of each class: teaching wealth to be generous, power to be meek, and the lower orders "to be diligent, humble, patient," reminding them "that their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand of God," that they should be content with food and clothing, and that "their situation in life, with all its evils, is better than they have deserved at the hand of God." Every clause of that has a text behind it, and none of it is false as a word to an individual believer. As a word from a wealthy member of Parliament to a class of people whose wages were being cut, it reads very differently, and Scripture itself carries the counterweight he did not print: the wages kept back by fraud cry out to the Lord of hosts (James 5:4), and the mouth is to be opened for the rights of all who are destitute (Proverbs 31:8, 31:9). - How he voted. He spoke at York on 1 December 1795 for the government’s bills against seditious meetings, at a county meeting called to oppose them, and had the speech printed. In 1799, with a bill before Parliament against a combination of London millwrights, a combination being the word of the day for workmen banding together to press their employers for better terms, it was his suggestion that the House go further and pass a general law against combinations in every trade. Pitt’s government did, and the Combination Acts made it a crime for working men to organise for shorter hours or better pay for a quarter of a century. The man who had told the House that a nation owns the evil it permits helped write that one. - Whom he would not have as allies. When women began forming their own anti-slavery associations and pressing for immediate abolition, he objected. Writing privately to Thomas Babington in 1826 he called it unsuitable: for ladies to meet, to publish, to go from house to house stirring up petitions, "these appear to me proceedings unsuited to the female character as delineated in Scripture." The women went on anyway, their societies were among the most effective organisations of the emancipation campaign, and the argument for immediate abolition that he had resisted was the one that prevailed. None of this is a reason to discount the life, and Wilberforce would have been the last man to want the account balanced in his favour. It is the same point he made to the House of Commons in 1789 (T1), turned round on him: a good man of a particular class and century absorbs the blindnesses of that class and century, and takes the shame of them with everybody else.