Vox Meditantis

London – 22nd July 1833

The smell of coal smoke and Thames mud hangs heavy in the morning air as I walk toward Westminster, my footsteps echoing against the cobblestones. Today, we vote. After twenty-six years of parliamentary battles, false starts, and moral wrestling, the Slavery Abolition Act comes before the Commons for its final reading. I can feel the weight of history pressing down upon my shoulders like a physical thing—every chain that might be broken, every life that might be freed, every compromise that stains my conscience.

You who read this in times I cannot imagine—what would you change about your world? What great evil do you accept as normal, as inevitable, as simply “the way things are”? I ask because I have spent these past years learning that the most insidious enemy of justice is not hatred, but comfort. Comfortable ignorance. Comfortable profit. Comfortable silence.

This morning, I received a letter from my old friend William Wilberforce, too frail now to continue the fight he began. “The torch passes to younger hands,” he wrote, “but the fire remains the same.” The fire—yes, I know it well. It burns in the chest when you see injustice, when you understand that human beings are bought and sold like cattle whilst respectable men take tea and speak of the weather. But fires can consume as well as illuminate, and I have learned to tend this one carefully.

Walking through the corridors of power, I pass men who will vote with us today—not from conviction, but from calculation. The economic tide has turned. Sugar can be produced more cheaply by free labour in India than by enslaved labour in the Caribbean. How convenient that morality and profit should finally align. Yet I cannot bring myself to celebrate this cynicism, for it mirrors something I see in your age as well—the way humanity progresses not through moral awakening, but through the cold mathematics of self-interest.

What would I change about your modern society? This very tendency to wait for righteousness to become profitable before embracing it.

I think of my first speech in Parliament, ten years past, when I stood before men who owned sugar plantations and shipping companies, men whose very boots were purchased with the blood of enslaved Africans. They listened with the polite attention one gives to a child reciting poetry—indulgent, amused, ultimately dismissive. “Young Buxton,” one merchant told me afterward, “your heart does you credit, but economics are not changed by sentiment.”

Economics. The word tastes like ash in my mouth. We speak of economics as if it were a law of nature, immutable as gravity. But economics is nothing more than the choices we make about how to treat one another. When we say something is economically impossible, we mean only that we are unwilling to pay the true cost of justice.

Today’s bill includes provisions that make my stomach turn—twenty million pounds in compensation to slave owners, as if losing the right to own human beings were a financial hardship deserving remedy. My colleagues call this pragmatism. “We must be realistic, Buxton. Change comes slowly. We cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

But tell me—you who live in ages I cannot foresee—when your descendants judge your compromises, will they find them so reasonable? When they ask why you took so long to address the great evils of your time, will you tell them about political realities and economic necessities? Will you explain that change must come slowly, gradually, with proper compensation for those who profited from suffering?

The afternoon light filters through the tall windows of Westminster as members file into the chamber. I watch their faces—some showing genuine conviction, others mere resignation to inevitability. Sir Robert Peel catches my eye and nods. He has been a reluctant convert to our cause, but a convert nonetheless. Even the Iron Duke, Wellington himself, has signalled his support, though I suspect he sees this as merely another battle to be won rather than a moral awakening.

As I take my place on the benches, I think of the letters hidden in my desk at home—correspondence from freed slaves in the northern states of America, from Quaker abolitionists, from missionaries who have witnessed the horrors firsthand. Their words haunt me: children torn from mothers, human beings branded like cattle, souls crushed under the weight of bondage. These voices never reach this chamber. They cannot vote, cannot speak, cannot even legally exist as persons under British law—yet today, we presume to decide their fate.

What would I change about modern society? The way those most affected by our decisions remain the most distant from them. You have expanded the franchise beyond anything we might imagine, yet I suspect the fundamental problem remains: those with power make choices for those without it, and call this democracy.

The Speaker calls for order, and the final debate begins. Members rise to speak of tradition, of gradual reform, of the rights of property. I listen to their measured words and think of fire. Not the fire of rage, though God knows I have felt that, but the fire that burns when you finally understand that your comfortable world is built on uncompassable suffering.

I remember the moment my own comfort died. It was a Sunday morning in 1823, and I was reading my Bible in my study overlooking the Norwich countryside. The passage was from Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Simple words, but they fell upon me like a physical blow. How had I, a Christian, a member of Parliament, a man who considered himself moral, allowed such an obvious contradiction to exist unchallenged?

That moment changed everything. I began to see slavery not as a distant colonial issue, but as a stain upon my own soul. Every cup of sugar, every cotton shirt, every investment that touched the trade—all of it connected me to the suffering of people I would never meet but whose cries I could no longer ignore.

But awakening brings obligation. Once you see injustice clearly, you cannot unsee it. Once you understand your complicity, you cannot unknow it. The comfortable world I had inhabited—the world where good men could ignore great evils because they happened elsewhere, to other people—that world was gone forever.

Now comes the vote. Members rise, state their names, declare their positions. The clerk scratches their choices onto parchment with a quill pen, each mark representing thousands of human lives. The chamber fills with the scratch of his pen and the shuffle of feet. History is being written in real time, but it sounds like paperwork.

I cast my vote—”Aye”—and return to my seat. The arithmetic unfolds slowly, but the outcome grows clear. We will win, though the margin matters less than the precedent. The British Empire will declare, however imperfectly, that human beings cannot be property. The compromise disgusts me, but the principle transforms everything.

As the final tally is announced—283 in favour, 158 opposed—I feel not triumph but vertigo. We have moved the world slightly on its axis, and now must learn to live in the new landscape we have created. The slave owners will receive their compensation. The transition will take years. Loopholes will be exploited, and new forms of bondage will emerge under different names. Perfect justice remains as distant as ever.

Yet something fundamental has shifted. We have declared that some things cannot be bought and sold, that some rights cannot be violated regardless of profit, that human dignity possesses a value beyond calculation. The precedent exists now, a foundation upon which future generations might build.

Walking home through the evening streets of London, I think of you again—you who inherit the world we are shaping. The gas lamps flicker to life as darkness falls, casting pools of light that push back the shadows but never eliminate them entirely. Perhaps that is all any generation can do: push back the darkness a little further, create a bit more light for those who come after.

What would I change about your modern society? I suspect the fundamental challenge remains the same: the willingness to see clearly, to acknowledge complicity, to pay the true cost of justice rather than deferring it to future generations. You will have your own slaveries—perhaps subtler than ours, perhaps more systemic, but no less real. The question is not whether such evils exist, but whether you possess the moral courage to name them, to face them, to sacrifice your comfort for their elimination.

The Thames flows dark beside me as I cross Westminster Bridge, carrying the detritus of empire toward the sea. Somewhere across that ocean, people still wear chains, still suffer under the lash, still cry out for freedom that will not come for months or years. Our victory today is incomplete, compromised, stained with the very injustice we seek to eliminate.

But it is a beginning. And perhaps that is how all great changes occur—not through sudden moral awakening, but through the accumulated pressure of countless small choices, countless moments when individuals decide that their comfort matters less than others’ freedom. The fire passes from one generation to the next, and though it may flicker, it never dies.

Tonight, I will write to Wilberforce and tell him the news. Tomorrow, I will wake in a world where the British Parliament has declared slavery illegal, and I will continue the work of making that declaration meaningful. There will be new battles, new compromises, new forms of injustice to confront.

For you who inherit our choices, remember this: the arc of history bends toward justice only when people are willing to grasp it and pull. The future you desire will not arrive through inevitable progress but through deliberate action. Look clearly at your world, acknowledge your complicity, and have the courage to pay the cost of change.

The fire burns still. Tend it well.

Thomas Fowell Buxton

The End

On this day in 1833, the British House of Commons passed the Slavery Abolition Act by a vote of 283 to 158. The act came into effect on 1st August 1834, legally freeing over 800,000 enslaved people across the British Empire, though full freedom for many would not come until 1838. The British government compensated slave owners £20 million—equivalent to billions today—whilst the formerly enslaved received nothing. It would be another thirty years before slavery was abolished in the United States, and the legacies of both systems continue to shape societies worldwide.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.