When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  The Dream of Progress

  The material condition of the people is a standard subject for the political speech. Many speeches have been made on the topic, but only the rare ones survive in the canon. The best recent example was made by the man who made Blair’s leadership of the Labour Party possible, Neil Kinnock. In Llandudno in 1987, Kinnock described the dream of equal life chances in poetic style. As a speaker, Kinnock is the apotheosis of the reformist Left, in that he reserved his most magnificent scorn for the battle against the revolutionaries in his own party. Kinnock might, though only might, have been gentler on Dolores Ibárruri, the Spanish revolutionary who went under the rhetorical guise of La Pasionaria. Ibárruri was the voice of justice when the alternative was the military fascism of General Franco. She was the voice of a desire for liberation which, as we shall see, can easily lead in the opposite direction from the one intended: away from progress.

  This is a battle within the Left that continues until the present day. The Labour Party fought the 2017 general election with a leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and an organisational faction, Momentum, both of whom preferred doctrinal purity to piecemeal progress. It would be wrong, though, to suppose that questions of justice and equality have been the sole preserve of the political Left. Indeed, One Nation Conservatism was defined by Benjamin Disraeli, in a speech in 1872 in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, a short walk from where Blair spoke in 2006. Both before and after Disraeli there is an honourable Conservative tradition of social reform.

  In Piccadilly Circus in London stands the Angel of Christian Charity, more commonly known as the statue of Eros. This is a commemoration of the Tory social reformer Earl Shaftesbury, author of the Factory Acts of the 1840s, which reduced working time for women and children and introduced the idea of state responsibility for health and safety. Disraeli’s Factory Act of 1874 made education compulsory for children up to the age of ten, and the Public Health Act of 1875 forced councils to clear refuse and sewage and to provide an adequate water supply. The same year, the Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwelling Act started the clearance of the urban slums.

  The Conservative tradition of progress is represented in this book by two people not usually associated with the political Right. William Wilberforce is the Conservative Party’s best retort to the claim, often levelled by opponents, that it is always and only the party of the rich. He devoted his political life to the cause of the abolition of slavery. Looking back from today, the opprobrium that rained down on Wilberforce seems hard to credit. His speeches on slavery made him one of the most hated men in England. But, after two decades of ceaseless effort and disappointment, his day dawned. Despite feeling very unwell, Wilberforce spoke for three and a half hours on the theme of ‘Let Us Put an End at Once to This Inhuman Traffic’.

  Even less representative of the Conservatism of male merchants, Emmeline Pankhurst devised radical methods to win the right to vote for women. Since the granting of democratic rights to the propertied male in the acropolis in Athens, people had campaigned to widen the enchanted circle of the entitled. The franchise in Britain had been extended in 1832, 1867 and again in 1884, but even then the responsibility of voting was thought to be a burden too much for women. Emmeline Pankhurst’s oratorical talent was roused by the moral offensiveness of excluding anyone from democracy on the mere basis of being a woman.

  The other false criterion of moral worth that has been invoked to deny people equal weight in the consideration of their condition has been race. Perhaps the most famous, and perhaps even the greatest, of the speeches in this book is a passionate plea for the equal treatment of little black boys and little black girls in a racially divided America. In words taken from the Bible and given political immortality, Martin Luther King delivered, at the March for Freedom in Washington in August 1963, the most eloquent demand for equal worth that anyone has yet put into words. It is hard to resist the judgement that this speech contains the most irresistible closing in all rhetorical history.

  King’s words are passionately delivered, sincerely held and sadly still appropriate. But they would not merit their status as a statement of progress if they had not led to change. The ultimate verdict on the speeches that follow is that they show that progress is possible. They do not just record progress; they propel it and make it happen. The speech is the public argument for progress. Political change is slow and failure is part of the process but, measured both by material prosperity and expanded liberty, tomorrow in the democracies has always been marginally better than today, which is, in turn, marginally better than it was yesterday. That is a prosaic way of making a poetic point. The even better way is in the words that now follow.

  WILLIAM WILBERFORCE

  Let Us Make Reparations to Africa

  House of Commons, London

  12 May 1789

  William Wilberforce (1759–1833) showed that a member of the British Parliament can change the world. Without the words of Wilberforce, people who lived in freedom would have been indentured as slaves in the British Empire.

  Wilberforce was born on 24 August 1759 in Hull, the son of a wealthy merchant. William was a sickly child with poor eyesight, but he was blessed with a generous and kind nature. At Cambridge, he began a lasting friendship with the future prime minister William Pitt the Younger. In 1780, at the tender age of twenty-one, Wilberforce became MP for Hull, at a cost of £8,000 to buy the necessary votes, as was the custom then. He later represented Yorkshire in more tolerably democratic fashion. As a young MP in London, he lived a dissolute life. He was an habitué of gambling clubs such as Goostree’s and Boodle’s, his particular vices cards and late-night drinking dens. Wilberforce was described at this time, by the writer Madame de Staël, as the ‘wittiest man in England’.

  The great rupture in Wilberforce’s life came with a sudden conversion to evangelical Christianity in 1785. From then onwards he approached politics from a position of strict Christian morality. This led him down some strange paths. He was deeply opposed to trade unions, approved of government limitations on public meetings and, convinced that British society was descending into moral turpitude, occasionally suggested that the spread of profanity was as important as slavery. His efforts to ban adultery and Sunday newspapers came to nothing, but Wilberforce’s moralistic fervour could be damaging as well as eccentric. Thomas Williams, the London printer of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, was imprisoned at the instigation of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, which Wilberforce helped to found.

  The more laudable side to his passion was expressed in an interest in the poor conditions in the factories of newly industrialised Britain. Wilberforce campaigned to provide all children with regular education in reading, personal hygiene and religion. He was closely involved with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and campaigned for better salaries for curates. But, inspired by the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, his evangelical zeal found its greatest cause in the slave trade. Legend has it that Wilberforce’s decision to devote himself to the cause derives from a meeting with Pitt, by now the prime minister, under a tree in Croydon in May 1787. Wilberforce later declared that: ‘God has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade, and the reformation of manners.’ There may still be work to do on the latter cause, but the former gives him a place in history.

  Britain was at the time the world’s foremost slave-trading nation. The introduction of plantations in the American colonies, especially those growing sugar, had led to the extensive use of African slaves. Some 70 per cent of all enslaved Africans shipped across the Atlantic were destined to work in the sugar fields. Pioneered by the Spaniards and perfected by the Dutch, sugar plantations were eagerly adopted by the English from the 1620s. They were followed by tobacco plantations. The slave ventures were episodic at first, but were soon licensed and chartered from London. By the time Wilberforce came to be involved in the argument, British ships were regularly carrying black slaves from Africa, in the most appalling cond
itions, to be bought and sold in the West Indies as chattels.

  For nearly two decades Wilberforce repeatedly introduced anti-slavery motions in Parliament. The abolitionists published pamphlets and books, held rallies and issued petitions. The twenty-year campaign made him simultaneously one of the most loved and one of the most loathed men in the country. The speech that follows was delivered in Parliament in May 1789, a month before the French Revolution, as the House of Commons considered a Privy Council report, commissioned by Pitt, on the effects of the slave trade on British commerce.

  Wilberforce, who was never the most robust of men, had been feeling unwell before he spoke. It didn’t stop him speaking for three and a half hours which, though it would be unacceptable today, was not an unusual length for the House of Commons in the late eighteenth century. As a sign of the support of his friend Pitt, the prime minister, he was permitted to speak from the dispatch box, despite not being a member of the government.

  The text we have is not an official record, there being no such office at the time. It was the practice of contemporary newspapers to print their own versions of speeches, not always exactly verbatim. This speech, however, was printed and circulated afterwards as part of the continuing campaign against slavery. It is consistent with everything else we know about Wilberforce and likely, therefore, to be faithful to his intent.

  When I consider the magnitude of the subject which I am to bring before the House – a subject, in which the interests, not of this country, nor of Europe alone, but of the whole world, and of posterity, are involved: and when I think, at the same time, on the weakness of the advocate who has undertaken this great cause – when these reflections press upon my mind, it is impossible for me not to feel both terrified and concerned at my own inadequacy to such a task. But when I reflect, however, on the encouragement which I have had, through the whole course of a long and laborious examination of this question, and how much candour I have experienced, and how conviction has increased within my own mind, in proportion as I have advanced in my labours – when I reflect, especially, that however averse any gentleman may now be, yet we shall all be of one opinion in the end – when I turn myself to these thoughts, I take courage. I determine to forget all my other fears, and I march forward with a firmer step in the full assurance that my cause will bear me out, and that I shall be able to justify upon the clearest principles, every resolution in my hand, the avowed end of which is, the total abolition of the slave trade.

  For once the traditionally modest opening, in which the speaker claims to be inadequate for the scale of the task before him, is something more than standard technique. This is not to say that Wilberforce was not a noted orator of his day, for he was. Striking oratory at Castle Yard in York had won him political control of Yorkshire in 1784. William Pitt said that Wilberforce possessed ‘the greatest natural eloquence of all the men I ever knew’, which, from a man who himself carried quite a reputation as an orator and who was by this time prime minister, was a verdict not to be taken lightly. Wilberforce became known as the nightingale of the House of Commons – a reference both to his mellifluous speaking voice and his habit of attending evening debates. It was said of him, by a parliamentary reporter, that he had a speaking voice so attractive to the ear that if he talked nonsense the audience would feel obliged to listen nonetheless. That is by no means a virtue shared by all the speakers of famous words. Lincoln, Churchill and John F. Kennedy all had reedy, weak voices; all worried about the effect this had on their impact.

  Wilberforce’s modesty is therefore a reasonable recognition of the gravity of the occasion. He might also have been worried by the fact that his time for preparation had been cut short by illness. Wilberforce was known at the time for a style that was more conversational than the orotund contrivances of Burke or Pitt, but this speech is looser than it ought to have been. It is a classic example of Pascal’s adage that he would have written a shorter letter, only he didn’t have the time. Every speechwriter knows that editing is the greater part of writing, and anyone with a facility for language can write a long speech quickly. Writing the correct and appropriate short speech takes time. Wilberforce ran out of time and so turned up at the House with a structure scribbled on a piece of paper and a complete command of the facts about slavery. By the time he entered his third hour on his feet he was exemplifying another principle – the speaker who knows too much can be as great a menace as the one who knows too little.

  I wish exceedingly, in the outset, to guard both myself and the House from entering into the subject with any sort of passion. It is not their passions I shall appeal to – I ask only for their cool and impartial reason; and I wish not to take them by surprise, but to deliberate, point by point, upon every part of this question. 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. We are all guilty – we ought all to plead guilty, and not to exculpate ourselves by throwing the blame on others; and I therefore deprecate every kind of reflection against the various descriptions of people who are more immediately involved in this wretched business. In opening the nature of the slave trade, I need only observe, that it is found by experience to be just such as every man, who uses his reason, would infallibly conclude it to be. For my own part, so clearly am I convinced of the mischiefs inseparable from it, that I should hardly want any further evidence than my own mind would furnish, by the most simple deductions. Facts, however, are now laid before the House. A report has been made by His Majesty’s Privy Council, which, I trust, every gentleman has read, and which ascertains the slave trade to be just such in practice as we know, from theory, it must be.

  This slightly deceptive passage introduces the tone that Wilberforce is largely, though not entirely, going to deploy. This was an era, before the discipline of the party whip made such a prize of loyalty, in which Members of Parliament would routinely change their minds and their votes on the persuasive merits of a fine speech.

  Wilberforce knows his audience well and he wishes to move it to act. Plenty of MPs shared the view that slavery was wrong in the abstract. They just worried about the impact of abolition on trade and prosperity. Addressing a group of men who had, for the most part, bought their way into the House in order to stand for commercial and propertied interests, Wilberforce calculated that an argument predicated on the human worth of the individual slave might fail to carry the debate. He is thus, throughout, reasonable beyond measure towards the Liverpool slave merchants, some of whom he mentions by name. He could have laid the blame for slavery on them, but this would have lost him the argument. Instead, he says the shame belongs to everyone in the nation, himself included.

  The tone here is instructively moderate, cautious and generous to opponents and their arguments. Indeed, Wilberforce is at great pains to go through the commercial case for the status quo and knock it over. The speech relies more on clear argument and detailed factual commentary than it does on an evocation of moral horror or even appeals to Christian compassion. Wilberforce is clear that complete abolition of slavery was the eventual aim. The objective of this speech, though, was to win the battle to end the trade in new slaves. He therefore exhibits a primary skill of democratic politics – the patience to argue for a secondary item as a preliminary to the principal aim. This takes some of the drama out of the rhetoric but it is the stuff of how progress is made.

  I must speak of the transit of the slaves in the West Indies. This I confess, in my own opinion, is the most wretched part of the whole subject. So much misery condensed in so little room is more than the human imagination had ever before conceived. I will not accuse the Liverpool merchants. I will allow, them, nay, I will believe them, to be men of humanity. And I will therefore believe, if it were not for the multitude of these wretched objects, if it were not for the enormous magnitude and extent of the evil which distracts their attention from individual cases, and makes
them think generally, and therefore less feelingly on the subject, they never would have persisted in the trade. I verily believe, therefore, if the wretchedness of any one of the many hundred negroes stowed in each ship could be brought before their view, and remain within the sight of the African merchant, that there is no one among them whose heart would bear it. Let anyone imagine to himself six or seven hundred of these wretches chained two and two, surrounded with every object that is nauseous and disgusting, diseased, and struggling under every kind of wretchedness! How can we bear to think of such a scene as this? One would think it had been determined to heap on them all the varieties of bodily pain, for the purpose of blunting the feelings of the mind.