Voluntary slavery means voluntary renunciation of the chief privilege of human reason: the privilege of self-control. The spendthrift divests himself of external advantages; the miser yields up his life-blood for gold; but he who surrenders his personal liberty has sold his soul, as well as his body. Bondage circumscribes every sphere of activity. Political despotism impedes the progress of industry as galling fetters impede the circulation of the blood. Enterprising autocrats of the Frederic and Peter type have as utterly failed in the attempt of enforcing a flourishing state of commerce, as they would have failed in the attempt of enforcing the growth of a stunted tree by the tension of iron chains. In free America a voluntary pledge of abstinence has accomplished what in medieval Europe the most Draconic temperance and anti-tobacco laws failed to achieve.
The educational despotism of moral pedants has ever defeated its own purpose, and succeeded only in turning frank, merry-souled children into hypocrites [[103]]and sneaks. The idea that a barbarous system of military discipline could develop model warriors has been refuted on hundreds of battle-fields, where the machine-soldiers of despotic kings were routed by the onset of enthusiastic patriots, half-trained, perhaps, and ill-armed, but assembled by an enlistment of souls as well as of bodies. The unparalleled intellectual barrenness of the Middle Ages was well explained by the indictment of a modern English poet. “The bondage of the Christian doctrine,” says Percy Shelley, “is fatal to the development of originality and genius.” The curse of mediocrity has, indeed, for ages rested upon every literary product devoted to the promotion of clerical interests. The Muses refuse to assemble on Golgotha. Pegasus declines to be yoked with the ass of the Galilean ascetic. Outspoken skepticism is almost as rare as true genius, and it is not possible to mistake the significance of the fact that the great poets and philosophers of the last seven generations were, almost without an exception, persistent and outspoken skeptics. Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, Holbach, Leibnitz, Lessing, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schiller, Heine, Schopenhauer, Humboldt, Pope, Hume, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Gibbon, Buckle, and Darwin have all inscribed their names in the temple o! Liberalism; and Wolfgang Goethe, the primate of European literature, was at once the most consistent and the most anti-Christian of modern thinkers. “His personal appearance,” says Heinrich Heine, “was as harmonious as his mind. A proudly erect body, never yet bent by Christian worm-humility; [[104]]classic features, never distorted by Christian contrition; eyes that had never been dimmed by Christian sinner-tears or the apathy of monkish resignation.”
That resignation was for centuries enforced as the first of moral duties; but Nature has had her revenge, and even the fallen hierarchy would hesitate to recover the loss of their prestige by a return to the moral desert which for ages marked the empire of a mind-enslaving dogma.
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.