SLAVE ABOLITION

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 34, 3 November 1933, Page 11

SLAVE ABOLITION

Memorial to Wilberforce

CENTENARY APPEAL A memorial to William Wilberforce in the form of the endowment of a “■Wilberforce Chair of History” in the University College of Hull, and of a public oration, to cost £25,000. is proposed in a letter signed by the Duke of York and a distinguished appeal committee. The letter reads:— “The occasion of the centenary of tlie death of William Wilberforce, which took place on July 29, 1833, on the eve of the passage through the House of Commons of the Abolition Bill, surely must not be allowed to pass without, seizing the opportunity to memorialise his name and achievement. There are certain essential requirements to be met by any such memorial. • . It. must be a permanent and living record of his name. It must be an adequate memorial. The work of Wilberforce and bis colleagues for the abolition of slavery was a stupendous and almost ineredib.e achievement, the conquest, after a struggle lasting nearly 50 years, of selfishness. ignorance, and prejudice on a grand scale by sheer moral and spiritual energy. It was an achievement scarcely, if ever, rivalled in history. Only a great memorial can be worthy of the man who proved triumphantly that effective statesmanship is rooted in religious principle. It must be appropriate to the subject and iu accordance with the spirit of Wilberforce. His work was essentially to spread light with a view to influencing and liberalising opitiion on the question of human freedom, and the memorial should serve as a means of furthering among the generations to come this work which humanity will always need. It must in its location be appropriate to the connections of Wilberforce himself; and in this regard Yorkshire and, in particular, Hull, the home of his ancestors and the city of his birth, lay claim to him.

These requisites, it is felt, cannot be better met than by the endowment of historical and allied studies in the University College of Hull. The primary object is to establish a “Wilberforce Chair of History,” and thus a foundation will be laid for the building up of a school of history, with an especial reminder to all who teach and study there of the work of the emancipatoiPart of the proposal is to endow a public oration called “The Wilberforce Lecture” to be delivered annually in the University College Of Hull by some ehbsen person of eminence, and also, if possible, in some other suitable centre. The subject would be appropriate to the work of Wilberforce, dealing, for example, with some problem of the backward races or of liberty in a wider sense. For all time each generation of undergraduates and the citizens of Hull will have their attention drawn periodically to the name and work of Wilberforce. Wilberforce, as a boy. attended the Hull Grammar School and Pocklington School, and if a sufficient mm is subscribed we wish to see the institutions linked with the scheme by scholarships. The proposal has the warm appro) al of the living descendants of William Wilberforce, and we appeal for a sum sufficient to endow the chair and the annual oration, and also two scholatsliips. We do so with every confidence of generous response, believing that the whole civilised world will wish to see some worthy memorial to rhe great Yorkshireman. We are sure that the object proposed is worthy, and that if Wilberforce were alive to-day he would applaud every means of furthering in the city of his birth those studies from which alone can spring an effective belief in the spirit and ideal of liberty to which he devoted bis life.