The following extracts from the London Times are very significant:—
Effect of Emancipation on the African Race.—There is no blinking the truth. Years of bitter experience; years of hope deferred; of self-devotion unrequited; of poverty; of humiliation; of prayers unanswered; of sufferings derided; of insults unresented; of contumely patiently endured,—have convinced us of the truth. It must be spoken out loudly and energetically, despite the wild mockings of "howling cant." The freed West India slave will not till the soil for wages; the free son of the ex-slave is as obstinate as his sire. He will not cultivate lands which he has not bought for his own. Yams, mangoes, and plantains—these satisfy his wants; he cares not for yours. Cotton, sugar and coffee, and tobacco—he cares but little for them. And what matters it to him that the Englishman has sunk his thousands and tens of thousands on mills, machinery and plants, which now totter on the languishing estate that for years has only returned beggary and debt. He eats his yams, and sniggers at "Buckra."
We know not why this should be, but it is so. The negro has been bought with a price—the price of English taxation and English toil. He has been redeemed from bondage by the sweat and travail of some millions of hard-working Englishmen. Twenty millions of pounds sterling—one hundred millions of dollars—have been distilled from the brains and muscles of the free English laborer, of every degree, to fashion the West Indian negro into a "free and independent laborer." "Free and independent" enough he has become, God knows; but laborer he is not; and, so far as we can see, never will be. He will sing hymns and quote texts; but honest, steady industry he not only detests but despises. We wish to Heaven that some people in England—neither Government people nor parsons nor clergymen, but some just-minded, honest-hearted and clear-sighted men—would go out to some of the islands (say Jamaica, Dominica, or Antigua)—not for a month or three months, but for a year—would watch the precious protege of English philanthropy, the freed negro, in his daily habits; would watch him as he lazily plants his little squatting; would see him as he proudly rejects agricultural or domestic services, or accepts it only at wages ludicrously disproportionate to the value of his work. We wish, too, they would watch him while, with a hide thicker than that of a hippopotamus, and a body to which fervid heat is a comfort rather than an annoyance, he droningly lounges over the prescribed task on which the intrepid Englishman, uninured to the burning sun, consumes his impatient energy, and too often sacrifices his life. We wish they would go out and view the negro in all the blazonry of his idleness, his pride, his ingratitude, contemptuously sneering at the industry of that race which made him free, and then come home and teach the memorable lesson of their experience to the fanatics who have perverted him into what he is.
* * * * * * * *
The Abolitionists in America would have the population of the Southern States turned into a mixed race, whites, blacks, and mulattoes being on terms of equality, and constantly intermarrying; but if one thing more than another has tended to give to the Anglo-Saxon race in the New World the victory over the Spanish, it is that it has kept itself apart from the red and negro races, and lodged power constantly in the hands of men of European origin. It has been fully proved, not only on the American continent, but in our own colonies, that the enforced equality of European and African tends, not to the elevation of the black, but the degradation of the white man. We cannot find any sympathy for those who would try, in the United States, the plan of a half-caste Republic, and we trust that the Federal Government and the right-thinking part of the community will protect the South from the repetition of such outrages as that at Harper's Ferry.
Our own race is boastful as well as intolerant and aggressive. This is especially true of the New England type, and hence it is that we are prone to regard ourselves in many, if not all respects, superior to the people of the South. In some respects, undoubtedly, we have the advantage of those who have been born and educated under a very different social system; but, on the other hand, according to the law of compensation, we lack much that is valuable in the Southern character and mental constitution.
The nature of our climate and more especially of our institutions, has given to our English blood a new and most powerful stimulus, so that we develope an immense amount of intellectual energy and activity, which constantly seeks vent, and which constantly tends to run into some extreme or excess. Having lived for many years in a state of great material prosperity, we are prone to wax fat and kick. We have known no real evils, no invasion from without, or civil war within, and for want of any real danger we conjure up those that are imaginary. We torment ourselves with evils which have no existence but in our own brain. I think it was Judge Marshall who speaks of those imaginary evils, which as they are without cause, are also without remedy.
The Southern mind is less active and more conservative, sometimes erratic, but generally disposed to take a common sense and rational view of things, and is, in some respects, more reliable than our own. It forms an admirable check in our political system, and preserves us from a natural tendency to run into the extreme of radicalism, and that spirit of agrarianism which has destroyed all former Republics.
The constant tendency in a Republic is to remove all constitutional checks intended for the security of individual rights, and reduce everything to the rule of the majority. It is obvious that the Senate of the United States and the Supreme Court, though intended as checks upon popular impulse and outbreaks, are yet but very imperfect barriers when opposed to what is termed the will of the people. It requires but a few years to change the political character of the Senate so that it shall reflect the prevailing sentiments of the day, and the same is true of the Supreme Court. In some of our States the judges are already elected from year to year, and must become to a greater or less extent political partizans. When these checks are removed and the rights of the individual are dependant on the bare will of the majority, then we have a pure democracy, which is pure despotism, and a despotism so dreadful that it soon gives way to despotism of a milder form in the person of a military Dictator. We have no landed aristocracy which, in England, stands between the people and the throne, keeping each from encroaching upon the other, nor any real check in our system of government, unless it is the fixed fact of a large number of States, whose population is naturally and necessarily conservative, and which stands like a rock against the surging waves of popular excitement of agrarianism and radicalism from whatever quarter they may come. The assertion that Slavery was the corner-stone of American liberty, made some years ago by a statesman from South Carolina, was looked upon with amazement as a most absurd paradox, but time may show that it contained a truth which we have as yet failed to see and comprehend.
The Southern character is more impulsive, but also more open and genial than our own. If it shows a hasty spark, it is also soon cold and rational again. It is not brooding and intolerant, nor easily led away into excesses, such as too often befall us of a more Northern clime. One prominent cause for such difference is, no doubt, to be found in the fact that, while we, at the North, live in towns and cities where men are in a constant state of action and reaction upon each other, and the masses can be suddenly and extensively roused and excited, the Southern Planters live remote from each other, and, in many cases, in almost entire seclusion. Such a population is less in danger from these moral epidemics that from time to time sweep over communities, because it is sparse, and therefore not so much exposed to exciting causes; thus, while it loses many good influences which flow from a more compact society, escaping also many serious evils to which the latter is subject. It is not France, but Paris, the great centre of population, the seat of all that is luxurious and refined, of science and of art, of everything in short which can serve to adorn and embellish social life; it is this Paris alone that makes and unmakes kings and emperors, that overthrows one dynasty during the night and sets up another the next morning, and then gives the law to the nation which stands looking on. Some editor or some orator touches that sympathetic telegraphic chord which passes through each individual of this vast living mass, and in an instant, as it were, the gutters run with blood, a ferocious mob rushes through every avenue, seeking vengeance for wrongs, which, if they have no existence, in fact, exist not the less really in the excited and inflamed imagination. Then comes a satiety of blood, then a re-action, and then a state of things too often far worse than the first. Our own city of New York is considered by many to have become incapable of intelligent self-government, and to exhibit those evils which, especially under a government like our own, flow from the collection of a very large population at one point. A sparse and widely scattered population, which is also by necessity highly consecutive, may supply the very check we most need and which is not to be found in paper constitutions, courts or senates.
In the gradual progress of time, free labor will doubtless overrun the more Northern Slave States, bringing fertility to the soil, and improving in many respects the condition of the white race, though fraught with ruin to all of African descent. My sympathies are with the latter as well as the former, and I cannot wish to see our swelling, aggressive, Northern Anglo-Saxon tide, overflowing the Southern States, sweeping away perhaps the most conservative and useful element in our republican system, and at the same time utterly destroying in its course that helpless race which, in the providence of God, has been cast upon our shores. There is room enough for us all to live together in peace and harmony. The two races can co-exist in their present relative condition, but in no other way. This is the great lesson of history, experience, statistics, and the observation of every day.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Our English common law is said to be the perfection of human wisdom. It is founded in right, and its object is to ascertain and establish the right. The sources from which it is drawn have been thus enumerated. "The law of nature; the revealed law of God; Christianity, morality, and religion; common sense, legal reason, justice, natural equity, humanity."