To the Society of Friends—­a body not historically or theologically Evangelical—­belongs the credit of having first awoke, and tried to rouse others, to a sense of the horrors and iniquities involved in the slave-trade; but the adhesion of William Wilberforce and his friends at Clapham identified the movement for emancipation with the Evangelical party.  Never were the enthusiasm, the activity, the uncompromising devotion to principle which marked the Evangelicals turned to better account.  Their very narrowness gave intensity and concentration to their work, and their victory, though deferred, was complete.  It has been truly said that when the English nation had been thoroughly convinced that slavery was a curse which must be got rid of at any cost, we cheerfully paid down as the price of its abolition twenty millions in cash, and threw the prosperity of our West Indian colonies into the bargain.  Yet we only spent on it one-tenth of what it cost us to lose America, and one-fiftieth of what we spent in avenging the execution of Louis XVI.

In spite of all these conspicuous and beneficent advances in the direction of humanity, a great deal of severity, and what appears to us brutality, remained embedded in our social system.  I have spoken in previous chapters of the methods of discipline enforced in the services, in jails, in poorhouses, and in schools.[10] A very similar spirit prevailed even in the home.  Children were shut up in dark closets, starved, and flogged.  Lord Shaftesbury’s father used to knock him down, and recommended his tutor at Harrow to do the same.  Archdeacon Denison describes in his autobiography how he and his brothers were thrashed by their tutor when they were youths of sixteen and had left Eton. The Fairchild Family—­that quaint picture of Evangelical life and manners—­depicts a religious father as punishing his quarrelsome children by taking them to see a murderer hanging in chains, and as chastising every peccadillo of infancy with a severity which makes one long to flog Mr. Fairchild.

But still, in spite of all these checks and drawbacks and evil survivals, the tide of humanitarianism flowed on, and gradually altered the aspect of English life.  The bloody Penal Code was mitigated.  Prisons and poorhouses were reformed.  The discipline of school and of home was tempered by the infusion of mercy and reason into the iron regimen of terror.  And this general diminution of brutality was not the only form of social amelioration.  It was accompanied by a gradual but perceptible increase in decency, refinement, and material prosperity.  Splendour diminished, and luxury remained the monopoly of the rich; but comfort—­that peculiarly English treasure—­was more generally diffused.  In that diffusion the Evangelicals had their full share.  Thackeray’s admirable description of Mrs. Newcome’s villa is drawn from the life:  “In Egypt itself there were not more savoury fleshpots than those at Clapham.  Her mansion was long the resort of