Cannibals all! Part 15

"647. 'The protracted labor described above,' says the Sub-commissioner, 'is, I believe, quite unparalleled in the history of manufacturing processes. I have looked over a considerable portion of the Report of the Factory Commission, and there is nothing in the accounts of the worst-conducted factories to be compared with the facts elicited in the present enquiry.

Gentlemen who, from their official situation, were well qualified to judge, have also stated, in answer to my questions, that they knew of no instance in which the hours of work were so long as those above stated.'

"663. Of the general treatment and condition of these young people, the Sub-commissioner reports:--'The evidence of all parties establishes the fact that there is no cla.s.s of persons in this country, living by their labor, whose happiness, health, and lives, are so unscrupulously sacrificed as those of the young dressmakers. It may without exaggeration be stated, that, in proportion to the numbers employed, there are no occupations, with one or two questionable exceptions, such as needle-grinding, in which so much disease is produced as in dressmaking, or which present so fearful a catalogue of distressing and frequently fatal maladies. It is a serious aggravation of all this evil, that the unkindness of the employer very frequently causes these young persons, when they become unwell, to conceal their illness from the fear of being sent out of the house; and in this manner, the disease often becomes increased in severity, or is even rendered incurable. Some of the princ.i.p.als are so cruel as to object to the young women obtaining medical a.s.sistance.'"--(No. 626.)

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE LONDON GLOBE ON WEST INDIA EMANc.i.p.aTION.

We find the following frank and explicit admission in the Globe of 10th July, 1856:

"Our own West India Islands are fast relapsing into primitive savageness. When the rich lands of Jamaica are being yearly abandoned, and when in Trinidad and Guiana cultivation has almost ceased, it is not likely that England will care to extend her sovereignty further over tropical territory, which can only be brought into use by a system which has been solemnly condemned."

Now, let us rigidly examine and ascertain what is the condemned system, what the approved system, that has been generally adopted in its stead, and why this system is approved, and the free negro system condemned as a failure.

There is no doubt the writer alludes to the system of domestic slavery, in the general, as the condemned system; and especially, to that serfdom or villienage which lately prevailed, but is now abolished throughout Western Europe. In a.s.serting that the system of slavery has been condemned, and yet admitting West India emanc.i.p.ation to be a failure, he in effect maintains that the liberation of the villiens has been no failure. He means that it has been no failure, because the liberated villiens do work: aye, just twice as hard and as long as their ancestors, the serfs. He means it is no failure, because they not only work harder and longer, but work for half the pay or allowance of their servile ancestors. He means it is no failure, because the once masters, now employers, get their labor for half what it cost to support them as slaves. He means it is no failure, because free labor in England is more plentiful and far cheaper than slave labor in America. He means it is no failure, because the employers, besides getting cheaper and more abundant labor, are relieved of all the cares and anxieties of governing and providing for their laborers, in health and in sickness, in old age and in infancy. In fine, he means it is no failure, because the laborers of England are not half so free now as before their pretended emanc.i.p.ation. They have lost all their rights, half their liberty (for they work harder than before,) and their former masters have been relieved of all their legal obligations and responsibilities.

No--British emanc.i.p.ation has not failed, if we look solely to the selfish interests of the property cla.s.s. And British liberty, we shall show in another chapter, means the unlimited right of the property cla.s.s to oppress the laboring cla.s.s, uncoupled with the obligation to provide for them. But this writer well knew, that looking to the effect of emanc.i.p.ation on the condition of the laboring cla.s.s in England, it has been a cruel and monstrous failure, from first to last. They are almost as savage and ignorant as West India negroes, know nothing of the Bible, and live in a state of continued dest.i.tution, hunger, and excessive labor, from generation to generation--from infancy to old age.

West India emanc.i.p.ation was a blunder of swindling philanthropy. People were told that the negroes, after emanc.i.p.ation, would work harder, work for less, and be more of slaves than before, just as had happened with emanc.i.p.ated English. But philanthropy "hath bad luck." It overlooked, or forgot, the few wants and indolent habits of the negro, the abundance of mountain lands, the fertile soil, the volunteer fruits and mild climate of Jamaica. The negro _is really_ free, and luxuriates in sloth, ignorance and liberty, as none but a negro can. The mistake and the failure consisted in setting him really free, instead of nominally so.

Hinc illae lachrymae!

What vile hypocrisy to shed crocodile tears over the happy negro, and boast of British Liberty, which is daily and hourly consuming, by poverty, and cold, and foul air and water, and downright starvation, the lives of ten millions of your white brethren and neighbors!

But this system, which carried to untimely graves three hundred thousand Irishmen in a single season, has not been _condemned_. No; it is profitable to the oppressors, and will not be condemned.

In all countries where a few own the property and the population is tolerably dense, laborers relieved from domestic slavery are remitted to the exploitation of skill and capital, which renders them less free and worse situated in all respects after emanc.i.p.ation than before. To prove this great truth, is the chief object of our present work. We know that the philosophy of the subject is intricate and complex, and that we have the prejudices, fanaticism and prepossessions of a world to oppose and conquer. We therefore indulge in frequent iteration, and adduce numerous proofs, examples and ill.u.s.trations.

CHAPTER XIX.

PROTECTION, AND CHARITY, TO THE WEAK.

A mere verbal formula often distinguishes a truism from a paradox. "It is the duty of society to protect the weak;" but protection cannot be efficient without the power of control; therefore, "It is the duty of society to enslave the weak." And it is a duty which no organized and civilized society ever failed to perform. Parents, husbands, guardians, teachers, committees, &c, are but masters under another name, whose duty it is to protect the weak, and whose right it is to control them. The blacks in America are both positively and relatively weak. Positively so, because they are too improvident to lay up for the exigencies of sickness, of the seasons, or of old age. Relatively so, because they are wholly unequal to the whites among whom they live, in the war of the wits and free compet.i.tion, which universal liberty begets, and political economy encourages.

In old countries the white laborers are relatively weak, because all property is closely appropriated, and the capitalist cla.s.s possess the means of unlimited oppression. Everybody admits that in such countries the poor need protection. But there can be no efficient protection without enslavement of some sort. In England, it has often been remarked, that all the legislation for the poor is borrowed from the system of domestic slavery.

Public and private charity is a fund created by the labor of the industrious poor, and too often bestowed on the idle or improvident. It is apt to aggravate the evils which it intends to cure.

Those who give should have the power to control, to some extent, the conduct and expenditure of the objects of their charity. Not till then can they be sure that their gifts will be promotive of good. But such power of control would be slavery.

Can abolitionists solve these social problems?

Ambition has ever been considered the most n.o.ble of human failings. It is, however, no failing, or crime, at all. Ambition desires power, and without power there can be no safe, prudent and active benevolence. The selfish, the indolent, and the timid, are without ambition, and eschew power, because of the trouble, the expenses, and the responsibilities which it imposes. The actively good are always ambitious, and desire to possess power, in order that they may control, in some measure, the conduct of those whom they desire to benefit.

The best thing a philanthropist can do, is to buy slaves, because then his power of control is greatest--his ability to do practical good, most perfect.

We take this occasion to correct an error into which we had fallen as to Northern character. Benevolence, affection, generosity, and philanthropy, are equally common North and South; and only differ in their modes of manifestation. We are one people.

The daily and hourly exercise of these qualities is elicited at the South, because it is safe, prudent and expedient so to exercise them.

The reverse is true at the North: yet, "expel Nature and she will return again." Man is social and philanthropic, and his affections, dammed out in one direction, find vent and gush out in another. The people of the North are far more generous and munificent in the endowment of public charities, and other public inst.i.tutions, than we. This correction of our error does not affect our theories--if it be true, that you can only safely be charitable to dependents whom you can control. But if it did or does affect, neutralize and subvert them, it is due to truth,--and if we advance the cause of truth, we are ready for the sacrifice of all else.

"Our Trip to the North" excited doubts as to our estimate of Northern character; and subsequent observation, reading and reflection, have brought us to the conclusion, which we now with pleasure avow. We would rather be right than consistent.

CHAPTER XX.

THE FAMILY.

All modern philosophy converges to a single point--the overthrow of all government, the subst.i.tution of the untrammelled "Sovereignty of the Individual," for the Sovereignty of Society, and the inauguration of anarchy. First domestic slavery, next religious inst.i.tutions, then separate property, then political government, and, finally, family government and family relations, are to be swept away. This is the distinctly avowed programme of all able abolitionists and socialists: and towards this end the doctrines and the practices of the weakest and most timid among them tend. Proudhon, and the French socialists generally, avow this purpose in France, and Stephen Pearl Andrews re-echoes it from America. The more numerous and timid cla.s.s are represented by Mr. Greeley and the Tribune, who would not "at once rush," like French revolutionists, "with the explosive force of escapement, point blank to the bull's eye of its final destiny," but would inaugurate social conditions, that would gradually bring about that result. Mr. Greeley does not propose to do away at once with marriage, religion, private property, political government and parental authority, but adopts the philosophy and the practices of Fourier, which promise gradually to purify human nature, and fit it, in a few generations, for that social millenium, into which the bolder and more consistent Andrews urges society at once to plunge.

The Christian socialists are beautifully and energetically co-laborating with the infidel socialists and abolitionists to bring about this millenium. They also are divided into two parties. The one would wait upon Providence--only help it a little, like Mr. Greeley--and permit our poor old effete world to pa.s.s out of existence by gentle euthanasia. The other and bolder party, feel themselves "called" as special instruments, to give at once the coup de grace to the old world, and to usher in the new golden age, of free love and free lands, of free women and free negroes, of free children and free men.

We like the Northern socialist theoretical abolitionists--read their speeches, essays, lectures and books, because they agree with us, that their own form of society is a humbug and a failure; and in their efforts, speculations and schemes to re-organize it, afford the most beautiful, perfect and complete specimen of the reductio ad absurdum. A lecture from Mr. Andrews on No-government, an Oneida den of incest, a Greeley phalanstery, or a New York free love saloon, afford equally good instances of this mode of demonstration by the absurdities which they exhibit, and equally good proofs of the naturalness and necessity of slavery, since such horrid abuses are everywhere the approved and practiced outgrowth of free society. As all our thoughts, arguments, proofs and demonstrations are suggested by or borrowed from the abolitionists, it seems to us we ought to dedicate to them. The Tribune very properly remarked that our Sociology was the first attempt of the kind at the South. It ridiculed our ignorance, too, severely. It should have recollected that were there no sickness there would be no physicians. We a.s.sure the Tribune, we are quite a prodigy in these matters for a Southern man. We have no social diseases, and therefore no social doctors to write about them or cure them. Such diseases have been rare: for Aristotle complains that there are no terms to express the relations of husband and wife, or parent and child. These relations have worked so smoothly in slave society to this day, that we in writing have felt the same want of language of which Aristotle, more than two thousand years ago, complained. You should invent such terms at the North, if it be true, as Mr. Andrews states in italics, that there are ten fugitives from Northern matrimony to one from Southern slavery--from which he seems to infer very logically, that the necessity of abolishing the family at the North, is ten times as great as that for abolishing slavery at the South. He and you are experts, and we know it is presumptuous in us to dispute what you say about your own society. Still we are dead against your phalansteries and his love saloons. Gentlemen and scholars, generally at the South, would as soon be caught studying or practicing the black art, as in reading Owen or Fourier, or in building phalansteries. For ourselves, like the b.a.s.t.a.r.d in King John, we learn these things, "not to deceive, but to avoid deceit." We have whole files of infidel and abolition papers, like the Tribune, the Liberator and Investigator. f.a.n.n.y Wright, the Devil's Pulpit and the Devil's Parson, Tom Paine, Owen, Voltaire, et id genus omne, are our daily companions. Good people give our office a wide berth as they pa.s.s it, and even the hens who loiter about it, have caught the infection of Woman's Rights, for we saw but as few days ago a Shanghai c.o.c.k under its eaves hovering a brood of twenty chickens, whilst madam hen was strutting about in as large a liberty as any Bloomer or wise woman of the North.

Love and veneration for the family is with us not only a principle, but probably a prejudice and a weakness. We were never two weeks at a time from under the family roof, until we had pa.s.sed middle life, and now that our years almost number half a century, we have never been from home for an interval of two months. And our historical reading, as well as our habits of life, may have unfitted us to appreciate the communist and fusion theories of f.a.n.n.y Wright, Owen and Mr. Greely. In attempting to vindicate and justify the ways of G.o.d and Nature, against the progressiveness of Black Republicanism in America, and Red Republicanism in Europe, we would forewarn the reader that we are a prejudiced witness. We are the enthusiastic admirer of the social relations exhibited in the histories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The social relations established in Deuteronomy, and 25th chapter Leviticus, and as practiced by the Jews to this day, elicit our unfeigned admiration and approval. Moses is with us the Prince of Legislators, and the twenty-fifth Leviticus the best of political platforms. The purity of the family seems to be his paramount object.

Homer, too, especially in his Odyssey, charms and enchains us with his beautiful descriptions of family felicity and family purity. As conquest and commerce introduced wealth and corrupted morals and manners, the family was corrupted and disrupted, as it is now, at the most commercial points in the North. But we have only to pa.s.s over to Italy, and there, from the earliest days of tradition until the extinction of liberty, began by Sylla and Marius, and ended by Augustus, we find the family a pure, a holy and sacred thing. From that era till slavery arose in the South, the family never resumed its dignity and importance. Feudalism did something to correct the loose morality of the Augustan Age, but it adopted its colonial slavery, relaxed family ties, and never drew together in sufficiently close connection and subordination, the materials which nature dictates should form the human hive or social circle.

Aristotle understood this subject thoroughly; and it seems to have been generally so well comprehended in his day, that he takes little trouble to explain and expound it. He commences his treatise on Politics and Economics with the family, and discourses first of the slaves as a part of the family. He a.s.sumes that social life is as natural to man as to bees and herds; and that the family, including husband, wife, children, and slaves, is the first and most natural development of that social nature. As States are composed of families, and as a sound and healthy whole cannot be formed of rotten parts, he devotes much of his treatise to family education and government. Would that modern statesmen, philosophers and politicians, would become practical like Aristotle, and not attempt to build social and political edifices, until they were sure of the soundness of the materials of which they would construct them. As all human beings live for the greatest part of their lives in families, it is all important that they should look to the wise arrangement of this old and universal inst.i.tution.

We wish to prove that the great movement in society, known under various names, as Communism, Socialism, Abolitionism, Red Republicanism and Black Republicanism, has one common object: the breaking up of all law and government, and the inauguration of anarchy, and that the destruction of the family is one of the means in which they all concur to attain a common end. We shall quote only from Stephen Pearle Andrews, because he is by far the ablest and best informed of American Socialists and Reformers, and because he cites facts and authorities to show that he presents truly the current thought and the general intention. Mr.

Andrews is a Ma.s.sachusetts gentleman, who has lived at the South. He has been an Abolition Lecturer. He is the disciple of Warren, who is the disciple of Owen of Lanark and New Harmony. Owen and Warren are Socrates and Plato, and he is the Great Stygarite, as far surpa.s.sing them, as Aristotle surpa.s.sed Socrates and Plato. But it is not merely his theories on which we rely; he cites historical facts that show that the tendency and terminus of all abolition is to the sovereignty of the individual, the breaking up of families, and no-government. He delivered a series of lectures to the elite of New York on this subject, which met with approbation, and from which we shall quote. He established, or aided to establish, Free Love Villages, and headed a Free Love Saloon in the city of New York, patronized and approved by the "Higher cla.s.ses." He is indubitably the philosopher and true exponent of Northern Abolitionism. With this a.s.sertion, which none who read his Science of Society we think will deny, we proceed to quote from his able and beautiful lectures, embodied in a publication ent.i.tled "Science of Society." Our first quotation is from his first lecture and the first chapter of his work:

Every age is a remarkable one, no doubt, for those who live in it.

When immobility reigns most in human affairs, there is still enough of movement to fix the attention, and even to excite the wonder of those who are immediately in proximity with it. This natural bias in favor of the period with which we have most to do, is by no means sufficient, however, to account for the growing conviction, on all minds, that the present epoch is a marked transition from an old to a new order of things. The scattered rays of the gray dawn of the new era date back, indeed, beyond the lifetime of the present generation. The first streak of light that streamed through the dense darkness of the old _regime_ was the declaration by Martin Luther of the right of private judgment in matters of conscience. The next, which shed terror upon the old world, as a new portent of impending revolutions, was the denial, by Hampden, Sidney, Cromwell, and others, of the divine right of kings, and the a.s.sertion of inherent political rights in the people themselves. This was followed by the American Declaration of Independence, the establishment of a powerful Democratic Republic in the western world upon the basis of that principle, followed by the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, the Re-action, and the apparent death in Europe of the Democratic idea. Finally, in our day, comes the red glare of French Socialism, at which the world is still gazing with uncertainty whether it be some lurid and meteoric omen of fearful events, or whether it be not the actual rising of the Sun of Righteousness, with healing in His wings; for there are those who profoundly and religiously believe that the solution of the social problem will be the virtual descent of the New Jerusalem--the installation of the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth.

First in the religious, then in the political, and finally in the social relations of men, new doctrines have thus been broached, which are full of promise to the hopeful, and full of alarm and dismay to the timid and conservative. This distinction marks the broadest division in the ranks of mankind. In church, and state, and social life, the real parties are the Progressionists and the Retrogressionists--those whose most brilliant imaginings are linked with the future, and those whose sweetest remembrances bind them in tender a.s.sociations to the past. Catholic and Protestant, Whig and Democrat, Anti-Socialist and Socialist, are terms which, in their origin, correspond to this generic division; but no sooner does a new cla.s.sification take place than the parties thus formed are again subdivided, on either hand, by the ever-permeating tendency, on the one side toward freedom, emanc.i.p.ation, and progress, and toward law, and order, and immobility on the other.

Hitherto the struggle between conservatism and progress has seemed doubtful. Victory has kissed the banner, alternately, of either host. At length the serried ranks of conservatism falter. Reform, so called, is becoming confessedly more potent than its antagonist. The admission is reluctantly forced from pallid lips that revolutions--political, social and religious--const.i.tute the programme of the coming age. Reform, so called, for weal or woe, but yet Reform, must rule the hour. The older const.i.tutions of society have outlived their day. No truth commends itself more universally to the minds of men now, than that thus set forth by Carlyle: "There must be a new world if there is to be any world at all. That human things in our Europe can ever return to the old sorry routine, and proceed with any steadiness or continuance there--this small hope is not now a tenable one. These days of universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final! It is a time to make the dullest man consider, and ask himself, Whence he came? Whither he is bound? A veritable 'New Era,' to the foolish as well as to the wise." Nor is this state of things confined to Europe. The agitations in America may be more peaceful, but they are not less profound. The foundations of old beliefs and habits of thought are breaking up.

The old guarantees of order are fast falling away. A veritable "new era" with us, too, is alike impending and inevitable.

So much to show the width and scope of the social revolution that is contemplated as well by destructives as conservatives; for Mr. Carlyle is like ourselves, and thinks society needs more government, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up, instead of relaxing. He, too, is a socialist, but a conservative socialist. He a.s.serts, like Mr. Andrews, that society has failed, but proposes a different mode of reconstruction. At the very moment we in America were announcing the Failure of Free Society, he in Europe proclaimed the 'Latter Day' of that Society. It was but a different mode of expressing the same thought. Now we will show from this same lecture of Mr. Andrews, that the annihilation of the Family is part of the programme of Abolition. He says, page 31, in this same lecture:

Every variety of conscience, and every variety of deportment in reference to this precise subject of love is already tolerated among us. At one extreme of the scale stand the Shakers, who abjure the connection of the s.e.xes altogether. At the other extremity stands the a.s.sociation of Perfectionists, at Oneida, who hold and practice, and justify by the Scriptures, as a religious dogma, what they denominate complex marriage, or the freedom of love. We have, in this State, stringent laws against adultery and fornication; but laws of that sort fall powerless, in America, before the all-pervading sentiment of Protestantism, which vindicates the freedom of conscience to all persons and in all things, provided the consequences fall upon the parties themselves. Hence the Oneida Perfectionists live undisturbed and respected, in the heart of the State of New York, and in the face of the world; and the civil government, true to the Democratic principle, which is only the same principle in another application, is little anxious to interfere with this breach of its own ordinances, so long as they cast none of the consequences of their conduct upon those who do not consent to bear them.

And, page 33, he says:

In general, however, Government still interferes with the marriage and parental relations. Democracy in America has always proceeded with due reference to the prudential motto, _festina lente_. In France, at the time of the first Revolution, Democracy rushed with the explosive force of escapement from centuries of compression, point blank to the bull's eye of its final destiny, from which it recoiled with such force that the stupid world has dreamed, for half a century, that the vital principle of Democracy was dead. As a logical sequence from Democratic principle, the legal obligation of marriage was sundered, and the Sovereignty of the Individual above the inst.i.tution was vindicated.