Dear Sir—I have observed so much fairness in the manner in which slavery and other sociological questions are treated in The Liberator, that it has occurred to me you would not consider suggestions from an ultra pro-slavery man obtrusive, and might deem them worth a place in your columns. I shall not promise that the example of your liberality will be followed at the South. It is a theory of mine, that "recurrence to fundamental principles" is only treason clothed in periphrastic phrase; and that the right of private judgment, liberty of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion, are subordinate to these "principles," and must not be allowed to assail them,—else there can be no stability in government, or security of private rights. The South thinks me heretical, but feels that I am right, and takes care to trammel these sacred rights quite as efficiently by an austere public opinion, as Louis Napoleon does by law or by mere volition.
I entirely concur in a theory I heard Mr. Wendell Phillips[35] propound in a lecture at New Haven. I shall not attempt to give his eloquent words, for I am incapable of doing justice to his language; but the amount of his theory was, that governments are not formed by man, but are the gradual accretions of time, circumstance, and human exigencies; that they grow up like trees, and that man may cultivate, train and aid their growth and development, but cannot make them out and out. Now, I accept the theory, and propose, in the first place, to deter men from applying the axe to the root of our Southern institutions, (that is, discussing or recurring to "fundamental principles,") by moral suasion or monition; next, by tar and feathers, and, that failing, by the halter. The worst institutions that ever grew up in any country are better than the best that philosophers or philanthropists ever devised. As for ours, we deem them, since the days of Rome, Athens and Judea, the crack institutions of the world.
With these preliminary remarks, I will make the following suggestions or interrogations:—
Is not slavery to capital less tolerable than slavery to human masters?
Where a few, as in England, Ireland and Scotland, own all the lands, are not the mass, the common laborers, who own no capital, and possess neither mechanical nor professional skill, of necessity, the slaves to capital?
Was it not this slavery to capital that occasioned the great Irish famine, and is it not this same slavery that keeps the large majority of the laboring class in Western Europe in a state of hereditary starvation?
In old societies, where the laborers are domestic slaves, and exceed in number the demand for labor, would not emancipating them subject them at once to a mastery, or exacting despotism of capital, far more oppressive than domestic slavery?
Did not the emancipation of European serfs, or villiens, in all instances, injure their condition as a class?
In the event of the occurrence of such excess of domestic slaves, would it not be more merciful to follow the Spartan plan, and kill the surplus, than the abolition plan, which sets them all free, to live on half allowance, and to "make free labor cheaper than slave labor," by this fierce competition and underbidding to get employment?
Are there not fewer checks to superior wit, skill and capital, and less of protection afforded to the weak, ignorant and landless mass in Northern society, than in any other ever devised by the wit of man?