SOME REFLECTIONS ON HOW EMPIRE CAME TO US. 39 



It was this decision that determined Wilberforce's friends to 

 found the Asylum in Africa to which I shall presently allude ; 

 and Lieut. Clarkson, R.N., was commissioned to go first to Nova 

 Scotia, collect the Africans assembled there who had fought on 

 our side in the American War of Independence, and (if they 

 agreed) repatriate them in their own land. It was a big thing 

 to do, but Clarkson successfully accomplished it, and did more to 

 extend the Empire than he knew. 



Take only this instance of unconscious empire-building con- 

 nected with Wilberforce's twenty years' struggle in the House of 

 Commons. The scene is laid in Western Africa. The time is 

 about 1792. The Clapham Sect (as Wilberforce's friends were 

 generally styled) had decided on the purchase of a piece of land 

 which might become an asylum for these hunted people. For 

 the whole coast was a slave market from which Europeans of all 

 sorts were pushing the unholy traffic. They bought the hill 

 country of Sierra Leone with honest money from the Temne 

 people. They hoisted the Union J ack, and for twenty years it was 

 the scene (under tremendous difficulties) of a magnificent 

 philanthropy. 



Again I have to call your attention to a diary. Lieut. 

 John Clarkson, R.N., became the first Governor of this 

 settlement. On a certain Sunday evening he writes thus on 

 his ship in Sierra Leone Harbour : "I have been preaching on 

 shore to-day, and I have said this to the people : ' I do not know 

 five words of an African language ; nor am I acquainted with 

 five miles of the African interior, but I am certain that this 

 small beginning now being made here means the turn of the tide 

 in the fortunes of your race and is big with untold results to 

 this land.' " If to-day God seems to be saying to us there, in 

 Nigeria, in Uganda, in South Africa, and other parts, " Arise, 

 go through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of 

 it," it is because men like Clarkson and many others on the 

 West, because honoured C.M.S. Missionaries on the East, because 

 Moffat and Livingstone on the South, stood for a moral and 

 spiritual contact with African races, which, all unconsciously to 

 them, has actually extended empire. And thus far, thank God, 

 the British flag has been to all these races a symbol and guarantee 

 of justice, fairness, freedom and progress. 



Look again, this time forward, from 1807. 



We come to 1834. The story is too familiar to be related in 

 full, but it is not too much to say that the emancipation of the 



