Martyria Part 21

XXIII.

Wherever society forms and sustains itself, there must be adopted certain rules and laws to maintain it.

These seemingly arbitrary laws represent the interests, the pa.s.sions, and opinions of those who establish them, and they differ widely, according to the nature of the men and the climate which they inhabit.

The inhabitants of hot climes and the cold zones present strange contrasts in their natural ideas of justice, as well as in instincts and appet.i.tes.

The Turk regards intemperance as a crime, and polygamy as a virtue. The Englishman looks upon the one with complaisance, but regards the other with horror. Thus reason yields to physical force, or to the differences of climate; and what men call virtue in one clime, loses its force and beauty in another. Yet there are natural laws older than the empires of force or reason; more ancient than society itself; more powerful and sublime than the pa.s.sions and interests of men. These laws of kindness, of mercy, of friendship, like elementary language, come from divination.

Nature has planted certain instincts in the bosoms of all the different races of the globe alike; and these become developed according to cultivation, or debased according to degrading influences. The good of society may define the measure between good and evil, but it cannot extinguish the principles, or obliterate the sharply defined distinctions.

The will of the Creator has manifested itself clearly in the workings of the natural world, if it has not been revealed to us in those tablets which fell from the skies.

XXIV.

The benign influences of society, the exercise of politeness and reason, inspire polished and agreeable manners; yet, in the midst of these, we find men who think barbarity to be one of their rights; and they abuse their fellow-creatures without pretext, and commit murder without necessity, which is a degree of ferocity below that of the carnivorous animals; for they destroy life only when impelled by the motives of hunger. Societies of men are inst.i.tutions of nature, and they are founded upon the principles of mutual obligations. Society relapses into barbarism when the golden rule of "doing as we would be done by" is violated; when individual liberty is lost; and when man treats his fellow-man as property under the right of force, and therefore without legal relations.

Const.i.tutions are the indices of the education and the aspiration of nations, and they keep pace with the onward march of intelligence. These become altered and modified, as the intellect and hearts of men expand; and it is nothing but bigotry that believes in the inviolability, the perfection of the doctrines and tenets of men in the present or the past.

The wise man, says the old proverb, often changes his opinion, the fool never.

XXV.

Slavery appears to be coeval with war; and war is as ancient as the human race. Plutarch believed that there had been a time, a golden age, when there were neither masters nor slaves. The human mind, at the time when Plutarch wrote, was almost controlled by the empire of force. The selfishness and superst.i.tion of society fettered the n.o.bility of nature, and healthy reason could not a.s.sume its rightful sway.

The depth of the philosophical reasoning, the degree of humanity of one of the brightest periods of antiquity, may be comprehended from the "Politics" of Aristotle, when he says, "To the Greeks belongs dominion over the barbarians, because the former have the understanding requisite to rule, the latter, the body only to obey. For the slave, considered simply as such, no friendship can be entertained, but it may be felt for him, as he is a man." Some of the ancient nations, the most enthusiastic in the dreams of liberty, were the most savage and stern in their laws concerning their slaves; and they adhered to their brutal doctrines in defiance of nature with singular tenacity. The right of life and death over the slave was one of the fundamental principles of the society of the Athenians, Lacedemonians, Romans, and Carthaginians.

Strange condition of society among men who cultivated the arts and sciences so successfully! Yet it does not appear that any legislator attempted to abrogate servitude.

Stranger still that the glorious period of the reign of democracy at Athens should not have brought with it the universal freedom of men, when liberty was the divine ideal of its aspirations.

XXVI.

Not until the star of Christianity rose above the horizon of the pagan and superst.i.tious world, softening the hearts of men and revealing to them a new life, did Slavery vanish from among refined and generous societies, under the charter, _Pro amore Dei, pro mercede animae_. And never has it reappeared, except among those nations who have become debased from avarice, or depraved by ambition. When cupidity allows fanaticism to blind the mind with the belief that savages or negroes can be more easily converted to Christianity whilst in slavery than in freedom, then there is an end to social progress. Yet such were the ideas of Louis XIII. when he consigned the negroes of his colonies to Slavery. And such has been the creed of the slaveholders and breeders of America. The monstrous doctrine imposed itself upon the understandings of the slave faction, as the superst.i.tions of the false prophets have fettered and crushed the minds of the pagan nations. It has debased their natural sentiments, as well as it has depressed and perverted their natural talents and virtues. "In the same manner," said Longinus, "as some children always remain pygmies, whose infant limbs, fettered by the prejudices and habits of servitude, are unable to expand themselves, or to attain that well-proportioned greatness which we admire in the ancients, who, living under a popular government, wrote with the same freedom as they acted."

XXVII.

We may learn from the history of the past, if we will not accept the data of the present, how climate, food, domesticity, or recognized customs of society may alter the minds and dispositions of men; how they may gradually build up governments, founded upon monstrous ideas, and yet in unison with the compunctions of their conscience. Ascribe the origin to any cause you will, it does not alter the revolting facts, nor lessen the repulsiveness of the absurdity, nor the enormity of the crime. Volney believed "that the social inst.i.tutions called Government and Religion were the true sources and regulators of the activity or indolence of individuals and nations; that they were the efficient causes which, as they extend or limit the natural or superfluous wants, limit or extend the activity of all men. A proof that their influence operates in spite of the difference of climate and soil is, that Tyre, Carthage, and Alexandria formerly possessed the same industry as London, Paris, and Amsterdam; that the Buccaneers and the Malayans have displayed equal turbulence and courage with the Normans, and that the Russians and Polanders have the apathy and indifference of the Hindoos and the Negroes. But, as civil and religious inst.i.tutions are perpetually varied and changed by the pa.s.sions of men, their influence changes and varies in very short intervals of time. Hence it is that the Romans commanded by Scipio resembled so little those governed by Tiberius, and that the Greeks of the age of Aristides and Themistocles were so unlike those of the time of Constantine."

Volney observes that "the moral character of nations, taken from that of individuals, chiefly depends on the social state in which they live; since it is true that our actions are governed by our civil and religious laws, and since our habits are no more than a repet.i.tion of those actions, and our character only the disposition to act in such a manner under such circ.u.mstances, it evidently follows that these must essentially depend on the nature of the government and religion."

Says Addison, "In all despotic governments, though a particular prince may favor arts and letters, there is a natural degeneracy of mankind, as you may observe from Augustus's reign, how the Romans lost themselves by degrees, until they fell to an equality with the most barbarous nations that surrounded them. Look upon Greece under its free states, and you would think its inhabitants lived in different climates and under different heavens from those at present, so different are the geniuses which are formed under Turkish slavery and Grecian liberty.

"Besides poverty and want, there are other reasons that debase the minds of men who live under Slavery, though I look on this as the princ.i.p.al. The natural tendency of despotic powers to ignorance and barbarity, though not insisted upon by others, is, I think, an unanswerable argument against that form of government, as it shows how repugnant it is to the good of mankind and the perfection of human nature, which ought to be the great end of all civil inst.i.tutions."

"Liberty should reach every individual of a people, as they all share one common nature; if it only spreads among particular branches there had better be none at all, since such a liberty only aggravates the misfortune of those who are deprived of it, by setting before them a disagreeable subject of comparison."

"The pride of Athens," writes Mirabeau, "and the jealousy of the Greeks, banished forever the liberty of those countries, so long fortunate."

Such is and always was our world, covered from time to time with conquerors and slaves, because the conquering, in forging the irons of the unhappy, with which they bound them, sharpen those which must bind them in turn.

Such is and always will be man, from time to time despot and slave, for man, denaturalized by servitude, becomes readily the most ferocious of animals if he escapes an instant from oppression. There is but one step from the despot to the slave, from the slave to the despot, and the chain becomes them alike.

XXVIII.

There are strange forces constantly at work: civilizations spring up, disappear, and sometimes, but rarely, return again after a sleep of ages: it seems as though genius laid fallow for a period, like the golden grains.

The Greek mind teaches the Arabs under the Caliphs of Bagdad and Cordova, and in turn the Arabian influence instructs the reviving European mind after the dark ages. The fall of Constantinople crushed the Greek mind completely. The genius and the "G.o.dlike men" of Rome vanished under the influence of the strong blood of the Goths, and the flourishing nations of the African sh.o.r.e have yielded so completely to physical and moral causes, that we justly doubt the story of their magnificence, their power, their intelligence.

We see the effete races infused with the fresh blood; the vigorous juices of the Scandinavians march forward with unparalleled pace to the triumphs of reason and philosophy. The pure, warm, healthy vitality of the North recalls to life the exact sciences, the laws of reasoning, and philosophy, and aesthetics, which, arising from Grecian genius, had slumbered for a thousand years.

XXIX.

In the slave lands of America a high order of intellect was proclaimed; but when a.n.a.lysis approached, it sank into mediocrity, or vanished into dust, like the forms in the ancient tombs when exposed to the light of heaven. Slavery has produced nothing but horror. The flashes of light that have burst forth through its mists have been the expiring efforts of genius. Here the sciences have always languished and declined to take root, for they are the offspring of genius and reason. The arts never appeared, for the spirit of imitation never arose. To cultivate the sciences, there is need of exalted desire, which comes from healthy and prosperous races or from celestial fire. Here there was the barbarity of ignorance; the only desires were to increase the enormities of their crimes, by the spread and general adoption of Slavery, and to conceal its proportions and influences beneath a cloud of mental darkness, which is frightful to contemplate, when placed in comparison with intelligent communities like New England, Belgium, and Prussia.

They thought to perpetuate an aristocratic power, and transmit the inheritance of Slavery as a blessing, but they forgot that in the formation of happy nations and states humanity forms the broad base; they forgot that ambitious and avaricious families quickly degenerate and disappear completely from the earth. The vicissitudes of political life hasten that decline which is commenced by riches and rank, when supported by morbid ideas and sentiments.

The n.o.ble families of Athens and Corinth, the patrician body at Rome, vanished so rapidly as to excite the surprise of the nations they governed. The names of the descendants of the founders of Venice, written in the Libro di Oro, are no longer to be found among the living in Italy.

The same law is silently at work in our times.

x.x.x.

The inequalities of the earth's surface are like the rugosities of the human brain: the depths of the one contain the richest and most inexhaustible treasures of mineral wealth, as the wrinkles of the other collect the stores of mental lore. As the surface of the brain becomes less marked and rugged, the strength and scope of the mind vanish, and approach the standard of the lower animals; and likewise, as the elevated lands of the earth shrink in form, and sink into the level of the plain, so the characters of the races who inhabit them lose force and elevation.

Sometimes the minds of men are the reflections of the beauties and sublimities of nature. Sometimes men become degraded, and nature then does not inspire.

x.x.xI.

The lofty and diversified mountain range, or system of ranges, known as the Appalachian or Alleghany, rises or reappears in the State of New York, midway between the Atlantic coast and the sh.o.r.es of those fresh-water seas, Erie and Ontario. It then stretches down south-westward, with its adjacent spurs, through the great States of Pennsylvania and Virginia; then, dividing, it forms, with its eastern range, the western and northern limit of North and South Carolina and Georgia; and with the western it intersects Tennessee, forming that beautiful basin known among the white men as East Tennessee, but among the traditions of the red men as the Garden of the Manitou--their G.o.d. In Northern Alabama, the separated ranges seemingly unite; and pa.s.sing southward, towards the central portion of the State, the mountain summits gradually contract, and finally sink into the level of the great alluvial plains, which stretch away, without undulation, to the sh.o.r.es of the Gulf. These huge ma.s.ses of rock, dislocated and elevated like the Vosges and the Hartz Mountains at the close of the carboniferous or devonian period of the earth's age, contain, with the adjacent and connecting bands,--which are composed of the silurian, primitive, and metamorphic ledges,--most of the accessible mineral wealth of the republic. And the collective beds of iron, coal, marble, zinc, copper, and gold are unsurpa.s.sed in similar extent and richness by the mines of any country of the known world, with the exception of those wonderful deposits of ores and minerals among the unexplored and almost inaccessible recesses and plateaus of the Sierra Nevada or the Andes.

With the exception of the northern extremity of this mountain group, these mines of natural wealth may be said to have been unexplored. Below the rich and populous State of Pennsylvania, the hum of human industry ceases; for we then pa.s.s into the paralyzing shadow of Slavery. This Slavery forbade the development of the earth's treasures, as well as the enlightenment of the minds of the poor and ignorant whites. The forges of Vulcan would have hammered out and broken into fragments the chains of that bondage which not only oppressed the fettered blacks, but debased, with its corroding influence, the competing labor of the white man.

The slaveholders concealed this immense natural wealth from the eyes of science from motives of policy; and rather than incur the hazard of revolution, by educating the ma.s.ses of their own people, they preferred to neglect their natural advantages, and to send to distant and even foreign lands the products of their fields and their system, to be worked up into the marvellous fabrics of human ingenuity and skill. This same State of Virginia, which is the real gateway to the empires of the West, and which is not surpa.s.sed in natural physical advantages by any equal extent of territory on the globe, is the most ignorant of all of the States of the republic. Ninety thousand of its native-born free people, over twenty years of age, before the war could not read nor write; whilst sterile and stormy Maine, with her cold lands and colder skies, contained but two thousand of the same cla.s.s, out of a population more than half as great.

And New England, with a population of almost three times as great as the free people of Virginia, is ashamed by the number of seven thousand illiterate natives past the age of twenty. Who will wonder at the display of barbarity and audacity when the statistics of education and ignorance are exhibited? "Education and liberty," says Mirabeau, "are the bases of all social harmony and all human prosperity."

Which can civilization curse the most, London or Amsterdam? the Dutch who introduced Slavery, or the English who thought Virginia a good place to "colonize aristocratic stupidity," and who sent colonists, who were, according to the historian, "fitter to breed a riot than to found a colony." The condition of the present day shows how rigidly the first instructions have been observed and enforced. "Thank G.o.d," writes one of its early governors to the English Privy Council, "thank G.o.d there are no free schools or printing, and I hope we shall not have any these hundred years! for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best government. G.o.d keep us from both!"

x.x.xII.

And so these mines, and fields, and forests, remain to the present day, unsurveyed, unexplored and unknown, save to a few wanderers of science.

In Northern Alabama, where the terminating slopes of this upheaval of rocks disappear beneath the level of the vast cotton fields, which number their acres by the million, there appear enormous deposits of iron ore, of extraordinary richness and depth, lying in juxtaposition with corresponding beds of limestones and coal.