It would have been difficult to avoid a quarrel with Sugden, with Wetherell, and with old Lord Eldon himself.

Then the John Bull would have been upon us with every advantage.

The personal part of the consideration it would have been my duty, and my pleasure and pride also, to overlook; but your interests must have suffered." Meanwhile he was busy enough in fields better adapted than the law to his talents and his temperament.

He took a part in a meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society held at Freemasons' Tavern, on the 25th of June 1824, with the Duke of Gloucester in the chair.

The Edinburgh Review described his speech as "a display of eloquence so signal for rare and matured excellence that the most practised orator may well admire how it should have come from one who then for the first time addressed a public assembly." Those who know what the annual meeting of a well-organised and disciplined association is, may imagine the whirlwind of cheers which greeted the declaration that the hour was at hand when "the peasant of the Antilles will no longer crawl in listless and trembling dejection round a plantation from whose fruits he must derive no advantage, and a hut whose door yields him no protection; but, when his cheerful and voluntary labour is performed, he will return with the firm step and erect brow of a British citizen from the field which is his freehold to the cottage which is his castle." Surer promise of aptitude for political debate was afforded by the skill with which the young speaker turned to account the recent trial for sedition, and death in prison, of Smith, the Demerara missionary; an event which was fatal to Slavery in the West Indies in the same degree as the execution of John Brown was its deathblow in the United States.
"When this country has been endangered either by arbitrary power or popular delusion, truth has still possessed one irresistible organ, and justice one inviolable tribunal.