350 THE REBELLION. 



hearts palpitated "with excitement ; a thousand pens 

 were drawn ; the people that slumbered in sorrow and 

 captivity heard a voice bidding them arise ; they 

 strained, they struggled, and they burst their bonds. 

 Jacques Bonhomme, who had hitherto gone on all 

 fours, discovered to his surprise that he also was a 

 biped ; the world became more light ; the horizon 

 widened ; a new epoch opened for the human race. 



The anti-slavery movement, which we shall now briefly 

 sketch, is merely an episode in that great rebellion 

 against authority which began in the night of the middle 

 ages ; which sometimes assumed the form of religious 

 heresy, sometimes of serf revolt; which gradually estab- 

 lished the municipal cities, and raised the slave to the 

 position of the tenant; which gained great victories in the 

 Protestant Reformation, the two English Revolutions, 

 the American Revolution, and the French Revolution ; 

 which has destroyed the tyranny of governments in 

 Europe, and which will in time destroy the tyranny of 

 religious creeds. 



In the middle of the eighteenth century negro 

 slavery, although it had frequently been denounced in 

 books, had not attracted the attention of the English 

 people. To them it was something in the abstract, 

 something which was done beyond the seas. But there 

 rose an Agitation which brought up its distant horrors 

 in vivid pictures before the mind, and produced an 

 outcry of anger and disgust. 



It had been the custom of the Virginian or West 

 Indian planter, when he left his tobacco or sugar 

 estate for a holiday in England, to wear very broad 

 hats and very wide trousers and to be accompanied by 

 those slaves who used to bring him his coffee in the 

 early morning, to brush away the blue- tailed fly from 



