The Angry Tide by Winston Graham Read Free Book Online Page A

Sir John gave it to me.'
    Ross rose. 'Shall I call the children?'
    'No, the wind is in your face. Let's walk out.'
    They tramped over the rough grass and stones and were on the beach.
    'Why was it not well received, Ross? Reading it, it said just what I believe you think, and I could hear you saying it.'
    ‘ I met Wilberforce twice in February,' Ross said. 'He is a likeable, warm, religious man, but strangely blinkered. You know the saying that charity begins at home. Well, not with him. Quite the reverse. Charity with him begins overseas. He will work up a fine rage about the condition of the slaves and the slave ships - as who would not? - but can see little in the condition of his own countrymen to take exception to. He and not a few of his followers are supporters of the Game Laws; he favours all Pitt's measures to curb freedom of speech, and wishes to keep the wages of the poor down. I got up that day,' Ross said, frowning at the sea, 'with no prepared speech, which was lunacy, but you must know that when one man has finished speaking a number of others rise and it is for the Speaker - who is like a chairman - to choose whom he fancies. Maybe he picked me because I was new in the House. I was taken aback. It is a strange experience, for it is like speaking from the body of a church, with all the congregation lolling and sprawling and gossiping all about you. You are adrift in a sea of faces and hats and top-boots and hunched shoulders ...'
    'Go on.'
    'I am going on - as I did that day. I have to tell you that I did not stumble or stutter, for the challenge instead of overawing me - as it should have done by rights — annoyed mc. But I had come to my feet to support - of course - Wiiberforce 's Bill. As Canning had. As Pitt had. As any man with any compassion in his bowels would do. The arguments against were - abominable in the ingenuity of their twisted reasoning.' 'As you said.'
    'As I said. But, after speaking three or four minutes I - I felt it necessary to jolt all those men, all of them, if I could, with a realization of the evils that existed under their very noses. It was not, I said … But you have read it.'
    'Go on.'
    'It was not as a committed Christian that I spoke - for everyone in the House no doubt would claim to be that - perhaps particularly those who spoke against the Motion, since the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel it self owns slaves in the Barbadoe s. I spoke, I said, solely as a witness of man's inhumanity to man. This manifested itself in its worse form in the abominable slave trade hut existed also in lesser but no less evil forms on the doorstep of every one of us in the House that day There were, I said, in England one hundred and sixty crimes for which a man might be hanged; yet by the laws introduced over the last two decades many a man was now so poor that he could not live except by crime - if feeding his belly and his starving family was still to be considered such an offence. Grievous as it was, intolerable as it was, that human beings black or white, should be bought and sold in slavery, was the House aware that new slaveries were springing up in England; that, for instance, children employed in the mills of the north of England were dying in their hundreds of overwork while their parents, denied work of any sort, contrived to live off the tiny earnings th at their children brought home?’
    'That is better than it said in the paper,' Demelza said. 'And then?'
    'Rightly I was called to order - for I was veering right away from the subject of the debate - and thereafter soon sat do wn. I have not spoken with Wilbe rforce since, but he has given me a couple of cold nods, so I do not think my intervention was looked on with the greatest favour.'
    They walked on. The children had seen them coming now and were running to meet them.
    'And Lord Falmouth? Do you see much of him?'
    'I have dined at his house once and we have supped ove r at Wood's Coffee House in Cove nt Garden, where