Such zeal could not stop at the abolition of the traffic. Accordingly, Great Britain, by Act of Parliament, in 1834, enfranchised all the slaves in her own possessions, and thus again secured to herself the primacy of a lofty cause. The intervention was now openly declared to be against Slavery itself, assuming its most positive character while Lord Palmerston was Foreign Secretary,--and I say this sincerely to his great honor. Throughout his long life, among all the various concerns in which he has acted, there is nothing to be remembered hereafter with such gratitude. By his untiring diplomacy her Majesty’s Government constituted itself a vast Abolition Society, with the whole world for its field. It was in no respect behind the famous World’s Convention against Slavery, held at London in June, 1840, with Thomas Clarkson, the pioneer Abolitionist, as President; for the strongest declarations of this Convention were adopted by Lord Palmerston as “the sentiments of her Majesty’s Government,” and communicated officially to British functionaries in foreign lands. The Convention declared “the utter injustice of Slavery in all its forms, and the evil it inflicts upon its miserable victims, and the necessity of employing every means, moral, religious, and pacific, for its complete abolition, an object most dear to the members of this Convention, and for the consummation of which they are especially assembled.”[88] These words became the words of the British Government, and in circular letters were sent over the world.