Free Republic

Forty-six years.That’s how long William Wilberforce labored to see the end of slavery in the British Empire. His work began in earnest in 1787 when he first came into contact with abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson, Hannah More and Charles Middleton. These activists found a kindred spirit in Wilberforce, whose conversion to the Christian faith had given birth to an abiding concern for social reform—so much so, in fact, that he wrote in his diary, “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.”The dark and dehumanizing practice of slavery weighed heavy on him. He first...

Edmund Burke was, and still is, a provocative thinker—a provocation in his own day, as in ours. At a time when most right-minded (which is to say, left-inclined) English literati were rhapsodizing over the French Revolution—Wordsworth declaring what “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”—Burke wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France, a searing indictment of the Revolution. He was accused then, as he often is now, of being excessive, even hysterical, in his account of the Revolution: "a ferocious dissoluteness in manners, an insolent irreligion in opinions and practices, … laws overturned, tribunals subverted, industry without...

The sickness of the Great Revolution began an eternity ago, in that great realm outside of time and space, with Lucifer's haughty non serviam spat into the Face of God. 214 years ago today, on 5 September 1793, came the inevitable culmination of this sickness: the Reign of Terror. The Terror is an example of what happens when a nation's traditions — its hierarchy, its natural aristocracy, its culture, and its religion — are forcibly removed and replaced by an artificial power structure, a democratically-elected leadership, a synthetic culture, and a materialist belief system. Revolution is the cancer of nations....