Even before the consummation of the movement for the suppression of the negro slave trade there had sprung up an agitation for the suppression of the negro-slave system itself. England abolished slavery in her colonies in 1833, paying £20,000,000 for the emancipation of 800,000 slaves in her West India possessions. In the United States there was very little antislavery feeling prior to 1830.[757] At that time the great majority of the peoples of the Northern as well as of the Southern states, if they did not look upon negro slavery as wholly proper and right, at least regarded as reprehensible any interference with the institution where established. Even the Church in general denounced the abolitionists as infidels and pronounced their conduct fanatical and wicked.[758] But notwithstanding this opposition the abolition movement and the movement for the restriction of slavery to the states where already established gained impetus steadily, and the heated debate led up quickly to the Civil War. The most significant thing in that passage of our history is not the revolt of the South, but the revolt of the conscience of the North. Had there been no moral revolt in the North, there would have been no slaveholders’ revolt in the South. The development of moral feeling respecting the wrongfulness of slavery did not cease with the emancipation of the slaves as a result of the Civil War. Indeed, with the reform an accomplished fact, the clarification of the moral sense of the people has gone on uninterruptedly until a gulf has come to separate the present-day conscience of the great majority of the instructed and thinking classes in both sections of the Union from the conscience of the same classes one or two generations ago. [Sidenote: (_c_) As manifested in society’s treatment of its unfortunate and delinquent members] The record of society’s treatment of its dependent and erring members forms another inspiring chapter in the history of the growth of the new social conscience. In a little over one hundred years the Christian world has advanced from harsh vagrant laws to associated charities; from the burning of witches to asylums for the insane; from noisome dungeons to penitentiaries and institutions of rescue and correction.[759] The numerous and costly private and public institutions established and maintained by the new humanitarian sentiment is one of the most distinctive characteristics, ethically viewed, of modern civilization. So multiform are the expressions of this new spirit that it is impossible in so brief a survey as the present to exhibit in more than barest outline this phase of the ethical evolution.