friends - whom he gathered from across the political divide - took the first steps towards humanising the prisons and the penal code, and they pioneered popular education at a time when even a radical such as Cobbett thought it 'despicable cant and nonsense'. Wilberforce also championed Catholic emancipation and that of the dissenting sects and helped found the Church Missionary Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society. Wilberforce and his friends intervened on behalf of the victims of the Napoleonic Wars, spoke up for Greeks seeking independence, for British responsibility in India, for North Americans and groups as diverse as the Haitians and Hottentots. Wilberforce raised his voice against the Game Laws, criticised the Government for the cruelties of transportation to the penal colonies in Australia's Botany Bay, and he opposed the brutal use of flogging in the British Army, as indeed did Cobbett. It was Wilberforce's friend and colleague, the MP Thomas Gisborne6 who first raised the issue of the plight of children working in factories. The two men then turned their attention to the condition of climbing boys employed by chimney sweeps, the conditions in coal mines, and the shortening of working hours for children. It was to take many more years of campaigning, particularly by Lord Shaftesbury, before the conscience of the country was finally aroused to these social horrors. The enactment of such reforming measures was thanks to the engagement of Evangelical Christians, who did not shy away from unpopular causes and who were ready to challenge the status quo. Wilberforce had been elected to Parliament in October 1780, at the age of twentyone, for the constituency of Hull. He secured 1126 votes. For the following forty years he sat as a Tory Member of the House of Commons and, literally while he was on his death bed, he heard that his life's great work, the abolition of slavery, had reached a successful conclusion. 'Thank God,' he said, 'that I should have lived to witness a day when England is willing to give twenty millions sterling for the Abolition of Slavery.' Parliament had paid off the slave owners. Today's director of the Evangelical Alliance, Clive Calver, recently reflected on the example of Wilberforce:
We need a gospel that differs from the philanthropy of the nineteenth century. We should challenge and seek to change the decision-making organisations in our secular society. Wilberforce swam against the tide - he was told that the British economy would collapse with the abolition of slavery. But he kept going in order to change his world and show that human institutions are not above the heartbeat and demands of Christ's love.7