E.—REFORM.
Not all slaves can be freed by breaking their shackles; the habit of servitude may become a hereditary vice, too inveterate for immediate remedies. The pupils of Freedom’s school may be required to unlearn, as well as to learn, many lessons; the temples of the future will have to remove several aphoristic tablets to make room for such mottoes as “Self-Reliance,” “Liberty,” “Independence.” Victor Jacquemont tells a memorable story of a Hindoo village, almost depopulated by a famine caused by the depredations of sacred monkeys, that made constant raids on the fields and gardens of the superstitious peasants, who would see their children starve to death rather than lift a hand against the long-tailed saints. At last the British stadtholder saw a way to relieve their distress. He called a meeting of their sirdars and offered them free transportation to a monkeyless island of the Malay archipelago. Learning that the land of the proposed colony was fertile and thinly settled, the survivors accepted the [[105]]proposal with tears of gratitude; but when the band of gaunt refugees embarked at the mouth of the Hooghly, the stadtholder’s agent was grieved to learn that their cargo of household goods included a large cageful of sacred monkeys. “They are beyond human help,” says the official memorandum, “and their children can be redeemed only by curing them of the superstition that has ruined their monkey-ridden ancestors.”
At the end of the fifteenth century, when southern Europe was in danger of a similar fate from the rapacity of esurient priests and monks, Providence, by means of an agent called Christoval Columbus, offered the victims the chance of a free land of refuge; but when the host of emigrants embarked at the harbor of Palos, philosophers must have been grieved to perceive that their cargo of household-pets comprised a large assortment of ecclesiastics. “They are beyond human help,” Experience might sigh in the words of the British commissioner, “and their children can be redeemed only by curing them of the superstition that has proved the ruin of their priest-ridden ancestors.”
In regions of our continent where colonists might live as independent as the birds of their primeval forests, bondage has been imported in the form of an intriguing hierarchy, working its restless bellows to forge the chains of their pupils—of the rising generation, who as yet seem to hesitate at the way-fork of Feudalism and Reform. A timely word may decide their choice, and, by all the remaining hopes of [[106]]Earth and Mankind! that word shall not remain unspoken.