Mark Steyn on William Wilberforce
As he wrote in 1787, ‘God almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.’ … What we think of as ‘the Victorian era’ was, in large part, an invention of Wilberforce which he succeeded in selling to his compatriots. We, children of the 20th century, mock our 19th-century forebears as uptight prudes, moralists and do-gooders. If they were, it’s because of Wilberforce. His legacy includes the very notion of a ‘social conscience’: in the 1790s, a good man could stroll past an 11-year-old prostitute on a London street without feeling a twinge of disgust or outrage; he accepted her as merely a feature of the landscape, like an ugly hill. By the 1890s, there were still child prostitutes, but there were also charities and improvement societies and orphanages… . The hardest thing in any society is ‘the reformation of manners.’ [here]
