In the first Parliamentary debate on the slave trade, Colonel Tarleton, who boasted to have killed more men than any one in England, pointing to Wilberforce and others, said, “The inspiration began on that side of the house;” then turning round, “The revolution has reached to this also, and reached to the height of fanaticism and frenzy.”  The first vote in the House of Commons, in 1790, after arguments in the affirmative by Wilberforce, Pitt, Fox, and Burke, stood, ayes, 88; noes, 163:  majority against the measure, 75.  In 1807 the slave trade was abolished, and in 1834 slavery in the British colonies followed; and even on the very night when the latter bill passed, the abolitionists were taunted by Gladstone, the great Demerara slaveholder, with having toiled for forty years and done nothing.  The Roman Catholic relief bill, establishing freedom of thought in England, had the same experience.  It passed in 1829 by a majority of a hundred and three in the House of Lords, which had nine months before refused by a majority of forty-five to take up the question at all.

The English corn laws went down a quarter of a century ago, after a similar career of failures.  In 1840 there were hundreds of thousands in England who thought that to attack the corn laws was to attack the very foundations of society.  Lord Melbourne, the prime minister, said in Parliament, that “he had heard of many mad things in his life, but, before God, the idea of repealing the corn laws was the very maddest thing of which he had ever heard.”  Lord John Russell counselled the House to refuse to hear evidence on the operation of the corn laws.  Six years after, in 1846, they were abolished forever.

How Wendell Phillips, in the anti-slavery meetings, used to lash pro-slavery men with such formidable facts as these,—­and to quote how Clay and Calhoun and Webster and Everett had pledged themselves that slavery should never be discussed, or had proposed that those who discussed it should be imprisoned,—­while, in spite of them all, the great reform was moving on, and the abolitionists were forcing politicians and people to talk, like Sterne’s starling, nothing but slavery!

We who were trained in the light of these great agitations have learned their lesson.  We expect to march through a series of defeats to victory.  The first thing is, as in the anti-slavery movement, so to arouse the public mind as to make this the central question.  Given this prominence, and it is enough for this year or for many years to come.  Wellington said that there was no such tragedy as a victory, except a defeat.  On the other hand, the next best thing to a victory is a defeat, for it shows that the armies are in the field.  Without the unsuccessful attempt of to-day, no success to-morrow.