We take this occasion to correct an error into which we had fallen as to Northern character. Benevolence, affection, generosity, and philanthropy, are equally common North and South; and only differ in their modes of manifestation. We are one people.
The daily and hourly exercise of these qualities is elicited at the South, because it is safe, prudent and expedient so to exercise them. The reverse is true at the North: yet, "expel Nature and she will return again." Man is social and philanthropic, and his affections, dammed out in one direction, find vent and gush out in another. The people of the North are far more generous and munificent in the endowment of public charities, and other public institutions, than we. This correction of our error does not affect our theories—if it be true, that you can only safely be charitable to dependents whom you can control. But if it did or does affect, neutralize and subvert them, it is due to truth,—and if we advance the cause of truth, we are ready for the sacrifice of all else.
"Our Trip to the North" excited doubts as to our estimate of Northern character; and subsequent observation, reading and reflection, have brought us to the conclusion, which we now with pleasure avow. We would rather be right than consistent.
CHAPTER XX.
THE FAMILY.
All modern philosophy converges to a single point—the overthrow of all government, the substitution of the untrammelled "Sovereignty of the Individual," for the Sovereignty of Society, and the inauguration of anarchy. First domestic slavery, next religious institutions, then separate property, then political government, and, finally, family government and family relations, are to be swept away. This is the distinctly avowed programme of all able abolitionists and socialists: and towards this end the doctrines and the practices of the weakest and most timid among them tend. Proudhon, and the French socialists generally, avow this purpose in France, and Stephen Pearl Andrews re-echoes it from America. The more numerous and timid class are represented by Mr. Greeley and the Tribune, who would not "at once rush," like French revolutionists, "with the explosive force of escapement, point blank to the bull's eye of its final destiny," but would inaugurate social conditions, that would gradually bring about that result. Mr. Greeley does not propose to do away at once with marriage, religion, private property, political government and parental authority, but adopts the philosophy and the practices of Fourier, which promise gradually to purify human nature, and fit it, in a few generations, for that social millenium, into which the bolder and more consistent Andrews urges society at once to plunge.
The Christian socialists are beautifully and energetically co-laborating with the infidel socialists and abolitionists to bring about this millenium. They also are divided into two parties. The one would wait upon Providence—only help it a little, like Mr. Greeley—and permit our poor old effete world to pass out of existence by gentle euthanasia. The other and bolder party, feel themselves "called" as special instruments, to give at once the coup de grace to the old world, and to usher in the new golden age, of free love and free lands, of free women and free negroes, of free children and free men.
We like the Northern socialist theoretical abolitionists—read their speeches, essays, lectures and books, because they agree with us, that their own form of society is a humbug and a failure; and in their efforts, speculations and schemes to re-organize it, afford the most beautiful, perfect and complete specimen of the reductio ad absurdum. A lecture from Mr. Andrews on No-government, an Oneida den of incest, a Greeley phalanstery, or a New York free love saloon, afford equally good instances of this mode of demonstration by the absurdities which they exhibit, and equally good proofs of the naturalness and necessity of slavery, since such horrid abuses are everywhere the approved and practiced outgrowth of free society. As all our thoughts, arguments, proofs and demonstrations are suggested by or borrowed from the abolitionists, it seems to us we ought to dedicate to them. The Tribune very properly remarked that our Sociology was the first attempt of the kind at the South. It ridiculed our ignorance, too, severely. It should have recollected that were there no sickness there would be no physicians. We assure the Tribune, we are quite a prodigy in these matters for a Southern man. We have no social diseases, and therefore no social doctors to write about them or cure them. Such diseases have been rare: for Aristotle complains that there are no terms to express the relations of husband and wife, or parent and child. These relations have worked so smoothly in slave society to this day, that we in writing have felt the same want of language of which Aristotle, more than two thousand years ago, complained. You should invent such terms at the North, if it be true, as Mr. Andrews states in italics, that there are ten fugitives from Northern matrimony to one from Southern slavery—from which he seems to infer very logically, that the necessity of abolishing the family at the North, is ten times as great as that for abolishing slavery at the South. He and you are experts, and we know it is presumptuous in us to dispute what you say about your own society. Still we are dead against your phalansteries and his love saloons. Gentlemen and scholars, generally at the South, would as soon be caught studying or practicing the black art, as in reading Owen or Fourier, or in building phalansteries. For ourselves, like the Bastard in King John, we learn these things, "not to deceive, but to avoid deceit." We have whole files of infidel and abolition papers, like the Tribune, the Liberator and Investigator. Fanny Wright, the Devil's Pulpit and the Devil's Parson, Tom Paine, Owen, Voltaire, et id genus omne, are our daily companions. Good people give our office a wide berth as they pass it, and even the hens who loiter about it, have caught the infection of Woman's Rights, for we saw but as few days ago a Shanghai cock under its eaves hovering a brood of twenty chickens, whilst madam hen was strutting about in as large a liberty as any Bloomer or wise woman of the North.