That same resolution in defense of their liberties has always distinguished the nobler from the baser tribes of the human race. The natives of the Gambia Valley have no hesitation in selling their relatives to the Portuguese slave-traders, while the liberation of a single countryman (whom the enemy had determined to hold as a hostage) impelled the Circassian highlanders to risk their lives in a series of desperate assaults upon the ramparts of a Russian frontier post. The hope of covering the retreat of their fleeing wives and children inspired the heroes of Thermopylæ to make a stand against six-thousandfold odds. The crimps of the Christian church-despots found no difficulty in foisting their yoke upon the former vassals of the Roman empire, but when they attempted to cross the border of the Saxon Landmark, the kidnappers were slain like rabid wolves; and when the neighboring ruffian-counts, and at last Charlemagne in person, marched to the support of the clerical slave-hunters, they met with a resistance the record of which will forever remain the proudest page in the chronicle of the Germanic races. Cornfields were burnt, villages were leveled with the ground; for hundreds of miles the means of human subsistence were utterly destroyed; but the council of the Saxon chieftains refused to submit, and when the homes of their forefathers were devastated, they carried their children to the inaccessible wilds of the Harz highlands, where they grimly welcomed the aid of the winter snows, and defied frost [[98]]and starvation, rather than crawl to cross (zu Kreuze kriechen), as their vernacular stigmatized the cowardice of their crucifix-kissing neighbors. And when the Frankish autocrat had shackled their land with a chain of forts, they thrice rebelled with persistent disregard of consequences; nay, after the loss of the last murderous battle, the prisoners of war refused to accept the ultimatum of the conqueror, and rather than crawl to cross four thousand of their captive noblemen mounted the scaffold of the executioner on the market-square of Quedlinburg. The bodies of the heroes were thrown to the birds of the wilderness; but their deathless spirits revived in the philippics of Martin Luther and the battle-shout of Lützen and Oudenaarde, and will yet ride the storm destined to hurl the last cross from the temples of the Germanic nations.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Since the dawn of history the lands of freedom have produced fruits and flowers that refused to thrive on any other soil. For several centuries civilization was confined to a small country of republics: Attic and Theban Greece. “Study the wonders of that age,” says Byron to his friend Trelawney, “and compare them with the best ever done under masters.” Switzerland, in spite of its rocky soil, has for centuries been the happiest, as well as the freest, country of Europe. The prosperity of the United States of America, since the establishment of their independence, stands unparalleled in the history of the last eighteen hundred years; and, moreover, the degree of that [[99]]prosperity has been locally proportioned to the degree of social freedom, and has begun to become general only since the general abolition of slavery. Freedom blesses the poorest soil, as despotism blights the most fertile, and it is only an apparent exception from that rule that Italy continued to flourish during the first two centuries of the empire. The change in the form of government was at first nominal, rather than real, and under the rule of Augustus, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, Rome enjoyed more real liberty than many a so-called republic of modern times. When despotism became a systematic and chronic actuality, the sun of fortune was soon eclipsed, and the social climate became as unfavorable to art and literature as to valor and patriotism.
Personal independence is a not less essential condition of individual happiness. Bondage in any form, and of silken or gilded, as well as of iron, fetters, is incompatible with the development of the highest mental and moral faculties. The genius of Poland and modern Italy has produced its best fruit in exile. The progress of modern civilization dates only from the time when knowledge once more flourished in a Republic of Letters; and for a thousand years the monastery system of medieval literature produced hardly a single work of genius. Within the period of the last three or four generations the sun of freedom has ripened better and more abundant fruit in any single decade than the dungeon-air of despotism during a series of centuries. All foreign travelers agree in admiring (or condemning) [[100]]the early mental development of American children, who have a chance to exercise their intellectual faculties in an area untrammeled by the barriers of caste divisions and social restraints. They may yield to the pupils of the best European colleges in special branches of scholarship, but in common sense, general intelligence, general information, in self-respect, in practical versatility and self-dependence, an American boy of twelve is, as a rule, more than a match for a continental-European boy of sixteen; and the same holds good of the average intelligence and self-dependence of our country population. With the rarest exceptions the political economists of our Southern states agree that the agricultural negro as a freeman is a more valuable laborer than as a slave, and that emancipation, in the long run, has benefited the planter as well as his serf. I venture even to add the verdict of Professor Hagenbeck, the founder of the great zoölogical supply depot, that menagerie-trainers of the least despotic methods are the most successful. Turf-men know that the best horses do not come from the unequaled perennial pastures of the lower Danube, but from England and Araby, where pet colts enjoy almost the freedom of a pet child.
C.—PERVERSION.
The ethics of Anti-naturalism include the Buddhistic doctrine of self-abasement, as an indispensable condition of salvation. That salvation meant extinction, the utter renunciation of earthly hopes and desires, the mortification of all natural instincts, including [[101]]the instinct of freedom. Abject submission to injustice, the subordination of reason to dogma, the sinfulness of rebellion against the “powers that be,” were inculcated with a zeal that made the church an invaluable ally of despotism. For centuries a scepter combining the form of a cross and a bludgeon was the significant emblem of tyranny. With the aid, nay, in the name, of the Christian hierarchy, the despots of the Middle Ages elaborated a system of subordination of personal freedom to autocratic caprices, which, by comparison, makes the tyranny of the Cæsars a model of liberalism. Every important function of social and domestic life was subjected to the control of arbitrary functionaries, armed with irresponsible power or with a system of oppressive penal by-laws. Censors suppressed every symptom of visible or audible protest. Every school was a prison, every judgment-seat a star-chamber. Peasants and mechanics had no voice in the councils of their rulers. The merit of official employees was measured by the degree of their flunkeyism. But the ne-plus-ultras of physical and moral despotism were combined in the slavery of the monastic convents. The attempt of reviving the outrages which abbots for centuries practiced on the unfortunates whom a rash vow (or often the mandate of a bigoted parent) had submitted to their power, would certainly expose the manager of a modern convent to the risk of being mobbed and torn limb from limb. Novices were subjected to all sorts of wanton tortures and arbitrary deprivation of his scant privileges; they were compelled to perform shameful and ridiculous [[102]]acts of self-abasement, all merely to “break their worldly spirit,” i.e., crush out the last vestige of self-respect and life-love, in order to prepare them for the consolations of other-worldliness. The moral emasculation of the human race seems, indeed, to have been the main purpose of the educational policy which the priests of the Nature-hating Galilean pursued wherever the union of Church and State put children and devotees at the mercy of their dogmatists.