Meanwhile, however, slavery was suffering and expiring in nearly all parts of Europe.  England began her battle against it even before the beginning of the century.  The work of the philanthropists, begun as far back as 1786-87, when the Quakers, under the leadership of Clarkson and Sharpe, began to cry out against the atrocity of human bondage, now reached the public authorities, and ministers found it necessary to take heed of what the people were saying and doing.  Both Pitt and Fox became abolitionists before the close of the eighteenth century.  The first attack was against the slave trade.  Bills for the abolition of this trade were passed in 1793-94 by the House of Commons, but were rejected by the Peers.  In 1804 another act was passed; but this also was rejected by the Lords.  So too, the bill of 1805!  The agitation continued during 1806; and in 1807, just after the death of Fox, the slave trade was abolished in Great Britain.

The abolitionists went straight ahead, however, to attack slavery itself.  The Anti-slavery Society was founded.  Clarkson and Wilberforce and Buxton became the evangels of a new order that was seen far off.  It was not, however, until the great reform agitation of 1832 that the government really took up the question of the abolition of slavery.  The bill for this purpose was introduced in the House of Commons on the twenty-third of April, 1833.  The process of abolition was to be gradual.  The masters were to be compensated.  There were to be periods of apprenticeship, after which freedom should supervene.  Twenty million pounds were to be appropriated from the national treasury to pay the expenses of the abolition process.

It was on the seventh of August, 1833, that this bill was adopted by the House of Commons.  Two weeks afterward the House of Lords assented, and on the twenty-eighth of August the royal assent was given.  The emancipation, however, was set for the first of August, 1834; and this is the date from which the abolition of slavery in Great Britain and her dependencies may be said to have occurred.  In some parts, however, the actual process of extinguishing slavery lagged.  It was not until 1843 that the 12,000,000 of slaves under British control in the empire were emancipated.

The virtual extinction of human slavery in the present century, presents a peculiar ethnical study.  Among the Latin races, the French were the first to move for emancipation.  It appears that the infusion of Gallic blood, as well as the large influence of the Frankish nations in the production of the modern French, has given to that people a bias in favor of liberty.  All the other Latin races have lagged behind; but, France foreran even Great Britain in the work of abolition.  Scarcely had the great Revolution of 1789 got under way, until an act of abolition conceding freedom to all men without regard to race or color was adopted by the National Assembly.