Slavery, through the new power, will take its place in the Parliament of mankind, with the immunities of an independent nation, ready always to uphold and advance itself, and organized as an unrelenting Propaganda of the new faith. A power having its inspiration in such a Barbarism must be essentially barbarous; founded on the asserted right to whip women and sell children, it must assume a character of disgusting hardihood; and openly professing determination to revolutionize the public opinion of the world, it must be in open schism with Civilization itself, so that all its influences will be wild, savage, brutal, and all its offspring kindred in character.
“Pards gender pards; from tigers tigers spring;
No doves are hatched beneath a vulture’s wing.”[137]
Such a power, from very nature, must be despotism at home “tempered only by assassination,” with the cotton-field for its Siberia,—while abroad it must be aggressive, dangerous, and revolting, in itself a Magnum Latrocinium, whose fellowship can have nothing but “the filthiness of evil,” and whose very existence will be an intolerable nuisance. When Dante, in the vindictive judgment hurled against his own Florence, called it bordello, he did not use a term too strong for the mighty house of ill-fame which the Christian powers are now asked for the first time to license. Such must be the character of the new power. But, though only a recent wrong, and pleading no prescription, the illimitable audacity of its nature can hesitate at nothing; nor is there anything offensive or detestable it will not absorb into itself. It will be an Ishmael, with hand against every man. It will be a brood of Harpies, defiling all it cannot steal. It will be the one-eyed Cyclop of nations, seeing only through Slavery, spurning all as fools who do not see likewise, and bellowing forth in savage egotism,—
“Know, then, we Cyclops are a race above
Those air-bred people and their goat-nursed Jove;
And learn our power proceeds with thee and thine
Not as he wills, but as ourselves incline.”[138]