Abolition of Slavery.—­Abridgment of the Apprenticeship.—­The East India Company’s Trade is Thrown Open.—­Commencement of Ecclesiastical Reforms.—­The New Poor-law.—­State of Ireland.—­Agitation against Tithes.—­Coercion Bill.—­Beginning of Church Reform.—­Sir Robert Peel becomes Prime-minister.—­Variety of Offices held Provisionally by the Duke of Wellington.—­Sir Robert Peel Retires, and Lord Melbourne Resumes the Government.—­Sir Robert Peel Proposes a Measure of Church Reform.—­Municipal Reform.—­Measures of Ecclesiastical Reform.

Apart from the consideration of the abstract principle, on which the advocates of Parliamentary Reform had insisted, of the light of many classes hitherto unrepresented to representation, they had also dwelt on the practical advantage which might be expected to ensue from the greater degree in which public opinion would henceforth be brought to bear on the action of the Houses, and, by a natural consequence, on the administrative government also.  And the bill had hardly passed when this result began to show itself, not only in transactions of domestic legislation, but in others which affected our most remote dependencies, both in the East and West.  We have seen in a previous chapter how Wilberforce, after twenty years of labor and anxiety, reaped the reward of his virtuous exertions in the abolition of the slave-trade.  But he had not ventured to grapple with the institution which gave birth to that trade, the employment of slaves in our West India Islands.  Yet it was an evil indefensible on every ground that could possibly be alleged.  It was not only a crime and an injustice, but it was an anomaly, and a glaring inconsistency, in any British settlement.  The law, as we have seen, had been laid down as absolutely settled, that no man within the precincts of the United Kingdom could be a slave; that, even had such been his previous condition, the moment his foot touched English soil he became a free man.  By what process of reasoning, then, could it be contended that his right to liberty according to English law depended on what portion of the British dominion he was in—­that what was incompatible with his claims as a human being in Kent ceased to be so in Jamaica?  The sentiment that what was just or unjust in one place was just or unjust in every place; that a man’s right to freedom did not depend on the country of his birth or the color of his skin, had naturally and logically been widely diffused and fostered by the abolition of the slave-trade.  It was but a small step from admitting that there could be no justification for making a man a slave, to asserting that there was an equal violation of all justice in keeping one in slavery; and this conclusion was strengthened by tales, which were continually reaching those most interested in the subject, of oppression and cruelty practised by the masters, or oftener by their agents and overseers, on the unfortunate beings over whom they claimed power and right as absolute