with and extinguish all proved abuses; and Pitt at once promised him all the support which he could give.  It was no easy task that he had taken on himself.  A year or two before, Burke had applied himself to frame some regulations which he hoped might gradually remove the evil; but, little as he was moved by considerations of popularity or daunted by difficulty, he had abandoned the attempt, as one which would meet with a resistance too powerful to be overcome.  Wilberforce was not a bolder man than Burke, but he had no other object to divide his attention, and, therefore, to this one he devoted all his faculties and energies, enlisting supporters in every quarter, seeking even the co-operation of the French government, and opening a correspondence with the French Secretary of State, M. Montmorin, a statesman of great capacity, and, what was far rarer in France, of incorruptible honesty.  M. Montmorin, however, though alive to the cruelty of the traffic, was unable to promise him any aid, alleging the fears of the French planters that its abolition “would ruin the French islands.  He said that it was one of those subjects upon which the interests of men and their sentiments were so much at variance, that it was difficult to learn what was practicable."[160]

Wilberforce had already found that the English merchants were still less manageable.  Pitt had entered so fully into his views, that in 1788 he himself moved and carried a resolution pledging the House of Commons to take the slave-trade into consideration in the next session.  And another friend of the cause, Sir W. Dobben, brought in a bill to diminish the horrors of the middle passage by proportioning the number of slaves who might be conveyed in one ship to the tonnage of the vessel.  But those concerned in the West India trade rose up in arms against even so moderate a measure, and one so clearly demanded by the most ordinary humanity as this.  The Liverpool merchants declared that the absence of restrictions on the slave-trade had been the chief cause of the prosperity and opulence of their town, and obtained leave to be heard by counsel against the bill.  But Fox united with Pitt on this subject, and the bill was carried.  But this was all the practical success which the efforts of the “Abolitionists,” as they began to be called, achieved for many years.  And even that was not won without extreme difficulty; Lord Chancellor Thurlow opposing it with great vehemence in the House of Lords, as the fruit of a “five days’ fit of philanthropy which had just sprung up,” and pointing to the conduct of the French government, which, as he asserted, had offered premiums to encourage the trade, as an example that we should do well to follow.  It was even said that he had contrived to incline the King himself to the same view; to have persuaded him that the trade was indispensable to the prosperity of our manufacturers, and, in the Chancellor’s words, “that it was his royal duty to show some