This is almost a parallel case. The woman has not the rights which make the man free. But does this make her a slave? If it does, then is her slavery just what her nature requires.
The “woman’s-rights man” sees this parallel, and very properly concludes that if the negro be oppressed by a deprivation of political rights, the woman, whose very existence, both political and legal, is merged in that of her husband, can be none the less so. Here we must approve his arguments, and, with him, censure the abolitionist for inconsistency who is not also a woman’s-rights man; for if the negro be enslaved by being relieved of rights which to him are burdens, why is not the woman equally a slave who is, in the same way, excluded. His logic, from his premises, is, we think, unanswerable. But he does not seem to have discovered that different natures require different rules, limits and extensions for the attainment of proper civil status in society. When he discovers this, he may find, as others have found before him, that,
Concerning man, “though wrangle e’er so long,
’Tis only this, if Heaven hath made him wrong.”
Here, for the present, we take our leave of the negro, and turn our attention more directly to that loftier shoot of humanity, who, for a name, applicable alike to the whole of a general division—to the blue-eyed Teuton as well as to the black-eyed Arab—we have (in obedience to the classification of others) called the Caucasian.
He is a native of Western Asia, Northern Africa, and of the whole of Europe, and, within these limits, flourishes to a native fullness, and multiplies with a profusion which is now forcing his children out upon all the world. But the problem of his like success in other localities yet remains to be solved. Will he multiply and continue, on this continent, as he multiplies and continues on his own?
The Aztecs are already gone. The builders of our ancient American monuments (supposed to have been of our own race) unknown—gone probably through a decline, from causes which may still be cropping out. But the Caucasian is here master, as he is wherever else he moves upon the world. But he is not here actually native, for nature did not here place him at first. Why this exclusion, we may never know; or why the red-man of the forest was assigned to the continent long hid in the western seas. But if it be held that all men sprung from a common progenitor, and that countries and climates have divided them into races or species, why, then, are we not now in a transition from the Caucasian to the Indian? But as no such tendency is apparent, and our sphere of action is limited to things, not as they were, or as they may have been, but to that form in which we now actually find them, we need not linger on probabilities so remote and indefinable. Ours is the present time, and elements ours only as they exist. But whatever may be the operating influences of our continent, no one can help seeing that the Caucasian in America is undergoing a change. Where it will ultimate, time only can determine, but social conditions have already varied its course. The combination of white master and negro slave has given it one direction, while general individuality has given it another.
The French Celt of Lower Canada—now about a million in his individual numbers—has already, at the end of two centuries of American life, dwindled into a pigmy compared with his European progenitors, and the same is correspondingly true of the Castilian of Peru and Mexico. Do these facts determine, or rather, do they not throw shadows, on the ultimate of that experiment now in the full tide of its progress—the replanting of one continent with a people who are alone indigenous to another?
Situated between these extremes—between Canada on one side and Mexico on the other—is it probable that nature to us will be more kind than she has been to them. But evidences of changing natures is already patent among us. Our American men, say intelligent clothiers of our Northern cities, are from two to three inches less around the chest than are the Europeans. This is a significant fact. But he who opens his eyes, and looks upon our slender-waisted and light-muscled American women, and compares them with the heavy-chested and strong-armed women of Europe, will see even a greater change. The European women are the heaviest.
Men of science tell us that the Caucasian in America loses a portion of that cellular cushion which underlies the skin, or intervenes between it and what is called the aponeurosis; and that, as a consequence, not only does the chest diminish, but the face loses its fullness, the features sharpen, and the system generally experiences a change. This may be an immediate cause, for few facts are more patent among us than the marked fullness of European, and particularly of Teutonic faces; but for the ultimate cause, there has not yet been given, or, within our knowledge, even an attempted solution.