Or it will be the Læstrygonian cannibal, with Slavery a perpetual maw, and terrible to the civilized world as that distant power to the companions of Ulysses, when, according to Homer,
“One for his food the raging glutton slew.”[139]
Or, worse still, it will be the soulless monster of Frankenstein, the wretched creation of human science without God,—endowed with life and nothing else, forever raging madly, the scandal to humanity, powerful only for evil, whose destruction will be essential to the peace of the world.
Who can welcome such a creation? Who can consort with it? There is something loathsome in the idea. There is contamination even in the thought. If you live with the lame, says the ancient proverb, you will learn to limp; if you keep in the kitchen, you will smell of smoke; if you touch pitch, you will be defiled. But what limp so mean as that of this pretended power? what smoke so foul as its breath? what pitch so defiling as its touch? It is an Oriental saying, that a cistern of rosewater will become impure, if a dog be dropped into it; but an ocean of rosewater with Rebel Slavemongers would be changed into a vulgar puddle. Imagine whatever is most disgusting, and this pretended power is more disgusting still. Naturalists report that the pike will swallow anything except the toad, but this it cannot do. The experiment has been tried, and though this fish, in unhesitating voracity, always gulps whatever is thrown to it, yet invariably it spews the nuisance from its throat. Our Slavemonger pretension is worse than toad; and yet there are foreign nations which, instead of spewing it forth, are already turning it like a precious morsel on the tongue.
There is yet another ground on which I make this appeal. It is part of the triumphs of Civilization, that no nation can act for itself alone. Whatever it does for good or for evil affects all the rest. Therefore a nation cannot forget its obligations to others. Especially does International Law, when it declares the absolute equality of independent nations, cast upon all the duty of considering well how this privilege shall be bestowed so that the welfare of all may be best upheld. But the whole Family of Nations would be degraded by admitting this new pretension to any toleration, much more to equality. There can be no reason for such admission; for it can bring nothing to the general weal. Civil society is created for safety and tranquillity. Nations come together and fraternize for the common good. But this hateful pretension can do nothing but evil for civil society at home or for nations in their intercourse with each other. It can show no title to recognition, no passport for its travels, no old existence. It is all new. And here I borrow the language of Burke on another occasion:—
“It is not a new power of an old kind. It is a new power of a new species. When such a questionable shape is to be admitted for the first time into the brotherhood of Christendom, it is not a mere matter of idle curiosity to consider how far it is in its nature alliable with the rest.”[140]
The greatest of corporations is a nation; the sublimest of all associations is that composed of nations, independent and equal, knit together in the bonds of peaceful fraternity as the great Christian Commonwealth. The Slavemongers may be a corporation in fact, but no such corporation can find place in that august Commonwealth. As well admit the Thugs, whose first article of faith is to kill the stranger,—or the Buccaneers, those “brothers of the coast,” who plundered on the sea; or, better still, revive the old Kingdom of the Assassins, where the king was an assassin, surrounded by counsellors and generals who were assassins, and all his subjects were assassins; or yet again, better at once and openly recognize Antichrist, the supreme and highest impersonation of the Slave Power.