ABOLITION OF SLAVERY. 299 



should never have received any mark of favour from 

 his sovereign, and except at Newcastle, and in the 

 Great Northern Railway Station at Euston Square, 

 there is scarcely a statue of him in existence. 



There is no doubt about it that the eig^hteenth 

 century was a period of great men ; and it is in that 

 century that the first endeavours were made to improve 

 the education of the lower classes, by the Sunday 

 School system, originated by the benevolent efforts of 

 Robert Raikes, of Gloucester, born In 1735. In the 

 last century, too, the slave trade was abolished. 



It is a singular thing that attention was drawn 

 to the condition of the slave trade, by a Latin essay on 

 the subject by the undergraduates at Cambridge, the 

 question being, " Anne liceat invitos in servitutem 

 dare ?" — " Is it lawful to make persons slaves against 

 their will?" Clarkson, a graduate of St. John's 

 College, carried off the prize ; in after years it was 

 he, Wilberforce, Buxton, Brougham, and others, who 

 forced England to blot out from her escutcheon the 

 foul crime of slavery, and brought forward the Act of 

 Parliament which emancipated the negroes. 



But I have said enough about the eighteenth century, 

 and I have spoken of it at such length only because it 

 was the period of road travelling, and because, to give 

 the history of roads and of the vehicles that made use 

 of them, without makinof some endeavour to describe 

 the condition of the kingdom, and to mention some 

 of the famous names of that period, would be like 

 painting a picture and leaving out the background. 

 From the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, we 

 pass, first through a period of slow road travelling, 

 with all the attendant dangers of the road caused 

 by the faulty condition of the laws, which gave 



