Progress

23 March 2007



200th Anniversary of Abolition of Slave Trade Act Marked

On March 25, 1807, George III gave Royal Assent to the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. In so doing, he more than redeemed his ill-thought resistance to human rights known as the American War of Independence. He did have the help of William Wilberforce, a man of immense dedication to justice, who spent two decades fighting the trade. Two hundred years later, one ought to take a moment to reflect that despite homo sapiens’ best efforts, humanity does make progress on occasion.

Slavery throughout the British Empire persisted for another 26 years. After that, of course, it remained in the United States, Brazil and across the Middle East. Indeed, it was only abolished in Saudi Arabia in 1962 and Oman in 1970. Today, it is illegal in theory, but trafficking in human beings still persists. Newsweek recently ran an article that suggested 27 million are still enslaved in one way or another in 2007. Moreover, the legacy of slavery affects societies that practiced it in countless adverse ways.

Be that as it may, it is roundly acknowledged throughout most of the world now that the institution of slavery is plain wrong. As Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote in a recent edition of New Nation, “it’s hard to believe that what would now be a crime against humanity was legal at the time.” This incredulity of contemporary citizens of the world at the very idea of humans as property attests to the changed ethical outlook.

Moral relativism would argue that one set of ethics is as valid as any other, and this particular instance illustrates just what a steaming pile of untruth that approach is. Societies in which some humans are not full members but rather livestock are societies in which some lives are unfulfilled by law. Unless such relativism argues that happiness and misery, or life and death, are interchangeable, the very idea of a culture being more ethical (“better” in plainest terms) than another is self-evident.

When Mr. Wilberforce and his fellows finally got George III’s assent, they had actually made the world a better place for everyone. Their victory was long in coming, and it was incomplete to be sure. Yet, who would want to go back to how things were before? Progress is possible after all.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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