Epilogue

Abstract

The reform careers of the subjects of these essays spanned over a hundred years, from the time of the American and French Revolutions to the turn of the twentieth century. Sharp, Roscoe, Rathbone, Currie and Rushton were products of both the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolution, their convictions a mixture of reason and the excitement of the new radical ideas of liberty and equality, of faith in gradual progress spurred by a practical realization that their age constituted one of those tides in the affairs of men which must be taken at its full. What they saw in their own world could scarcely be reconciled with their vision of the future unless men such as they accepted the obligation of leadership in changing public attitudes and national laws. Slave-trading, with all of its violations of natural law, reached its height in the era when commercial growth and industrialization were changing the British nation demographically, forcing the working population into slum areas of cities where their poverty and degradation were highly visible.