Butler’s theme is titled “On Mans Cruelty” and takes its cue from Virgil’s Georgics IV.513–14 when the poet recounts the nightingale’s mourning after a “heartless ploughman” (durus arator) steals her chicks. Thesuffering of Virgil’s nightingale serves as a springboard for the teenager to reflect on the greatest form of abject cruelty of his time: the transatlantic slave trade that was, in his day, continuing to thrive commercially. In the first half, Butler describes the cruelty of children torturing or killing animals and insects. (Indeed, one can imagine that Butler’s description of cruel and callous boys may have been inspired directly by his peers at Rugby – an infamously tough environment in its day). Although Butler makes similar remarks about sadistic children torturing flies growing up to become callous adults who commit atrocious crimes in two of his verse compositions in Latin (which are also titled “On Mans Cruelty”) from 26th and 27th March 1789, Butler’s attack on slavery in the second half of this prose composition is unprecedented:

“There is nothing more offensive to human nature than cruelty, which though universally detested is too generally practised. Never was any atrocious crime yet committed, which may not be attributed to it, & tho there are various species of it, yet all are to be held in the utmost abhorrence. An infant, who can out of wantoness torture flies & other little insects, will, when a man unless early checked, [not] hesitate at the commission of such acts of the most brutal nature. A Boy who can run with pleasure to see an ox butchered or a sheep slaughtered, will, by degrees, grow callous to all the feelings of humanity, & behold the death of a fellow creature with the utmost unconcern.

Of all the kinds of infantine cruelty, taking of birds’-nests is the worst, as it not only deprives the birds of a comfortable habitation, prepared with the utmost labour & industry, but robs them of their only remaining comfort, their young ones. The mention of it should be a tacit reproach to all parents who suffer it, a heart of sensibility would shudder at the idea. Cruelty, when once indulged, like other ill habits becomes inecsurable [i.e. inexorable] from us, and if children delight in it, what barbarity will they not practice when grown up?

The abolition of the slave trade, is an act highly creditable to all Europe, so nefarious a traffic, should long since have roused our attention. Does difference of colour make a fellow creature subservient to us, or because he is an unenlightened African, shall we, who have the advantage of religion make him our slave? Liberty must be dear to all, but it has ever been the boast of an Englishman, what therefore can be more barbarous, than to deprive another of a blessing which we ourselves so eminently value.

Cruelty exercised to dumb animals, is ever to be had in abhorrency, how much more so, when our fellow creatures are sufferers by it. Do we not exclaim against a man, for barbarously whipping an horse, what then shall we say to him, who scourges the undeserving with the most unrelenting severity. In whatever light we behold it, it cannot be approved, for tho’ it may conduce to our profit, it can never be consistent with honour, religion, or virtue.”

Considering that Butler’s remarks are dated five years before the abolition of slavery in Revolutionary France, why would the teenage Butler express such Abolitionist views in an environment like Rugby? The school, like other Public Schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was one of the principal bastions of empire-building in educating so many boys who would ultimately enter careers in colonial administration. How, then, did Butler come to hold such views? And why did he express them in his homework?

One answer could lie in considering what Butler could have been reading as a teenager. There is a precedent of attacking the slave trade within a Latinate context. Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846), one of the leading Abolitionists in England, published powerful accounts and images – such as the famous diagram of a horrifically and densely-packed slave ship – throughout his lifelong opposition to slavery. His first Abolitionist publication, however, was based on his prize-winning Latin essay at the University of Cambridge that he penned in 1785 where he attended (as Butler would) St John’s College. Like Butler’s essay, Clarkson’s anti-slavery treatise was spurred by a set theme: “Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?” (Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare). The following year, Clarkson translated and developed his Latin essay, which he published in 1786: An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. As an ambitious classicist, (one who would, like Clarkson, win prizes for his Latinity at Cambridge), could Butler have sought out and been inspired by Clarkson’s Essay?