"Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of wo,
That all was lost."
How much easier, then, to effect the ruin of poor, fallen man, by stirring up this fierce desire of equality with discontented thoughts and vain hopes of unattainable good! It is this dark desire, and not liberty, which, in its rage, becomes the "poisonous snake;" and, though decked in fine, allegoric, glowing garb, it is still the loathsome thing, the "false worm," that turned God's Paradise itself into a blighted world.
If Mr. Macaulay had only distinguished between liberty and license, than which no two things in the universe are more diametrically opposed to each other, his passion for fine rhetoric would not have betrayed him into so absurd a conceit respecting the diverse forms of freedom. Liberty is—as we have seen—the bright emanation of reason in the form of law; license is the triumph of blind passion over all law and order. Hence, if we would have liberty, the great deep of human passion must be restrained. For this purpose, as Mr. Burke has said, there must be power somewhere; and if there be not moral power within, there must be physical power without. Otherwise, the restraints will be too weak; the safeguards of liberty will give way, and the passions of men will burst into anarchy, the most frightful of all the forms of tyranny. Shall we call this liberty? Shall we seek the secure enjoyment of natural rights in a wild reign of lawless terror? As well might we seek the pure light of heaven in the bottomless pit. It is, indeed, a most horrible desecration of the sacred name of liberty, to apply it either to the butcheries and brutalities of the French Revolution, or to the more diabolical massacres of St. Domingo. If such were freedom, it would, in sober truth, be more fitly symbolized by ten thousand hissing serpents than by a single poisonous snake; and by all on earth, as in heaven, it should be abhorred. Hence, those pretended friends and advocates of freedom, who would thus fain transmute her form divine into such horribly distorted shapes, are with her enemies confederate in dark, misguided league.
§ V. The consequences of abolition to the South.
"We have had experience enough in our own colonies," says the Prospective Review, for November, 1852, "not to wish to see the experiment tried elsewhere on a larger scale." Now this, though it comes to us from across the Atlantic, really sounds like the voice of genuine philanthropy. Nor do we wish to see the experiment, which has brought down such wide-spread ruin on all the great interests of St. Domingo and the British colonies, tried in this prosperous and now beautiful land of ours. It requires no prophet to foresee the awful consequences of such an experiment on the lives, the liberties, the fortunes, and the morals, of the people of the Southern States. Let us briefly notice some of these consequences.
Consider, in the first place, the vast amount of property which would be destroyed by the madness of such an experiment. According to the estimate of Mr. Clay, "the total value of the slave property in the United States is twelve hundred millions of dollars," all of which the people of the South are expected to sacrifice on the altar of abolitionism. It only moves the indignation of the abolitionist that we should for one moment hesitate. "I see," he exclaims, "in the immenseness of the value of the slaves, the enormous amount of the robbery committed on them. I see 'twelve hundred millions of dollars' seized, extorted by unrighteous force."[206] But, unfortunately, his passions are so furious, that his mind no sooner comes into contact with any branch of the subject of slavery, than instantly, as if by a flash of lightning, his opinion is formed, and he begins to declaim and denounce as if reason should have nothing to do with the question. He does not even allow himself time for a single moment's serious reflection. Nay, resenting the opinion of the most sagacious of our statesmen as an insult to his understanding, he deems it beneath his dignity even to make an attempt to look beneath the surface of the great problem on which he condescends to pour the illuminations of his genius. Ere we accept his oracles as inspired, we beg leave to think a little, and consider their intrinsic value.
Twelve hundred millions of dollars extorted by unrighteous force! What enormous robbery! Now, let it be borne in mind, that this is the language of a man who, as we have seen, has—in one of his lucid intervals—admitted that it is right to apply force to compel those to work who will not labor from rational motives. Such is precisely the application of the force which now moves his righteous indignation!
This force, so justly applied, has created this enormous value of twelve hundred millions of dollars. It has neither seized, nor extorted this vast amount from others; it has simply created it out of that which, but for such force, would have been utterly valueless. And if experience teaches any thing, then, no sooner shall this force be withdrawn, than the great value in question will disappear. It will not be restored; it will be annihilated. The slaves—now worth so many hundred millions of dollars—would become worthless to themselves, and nuisances to society. No free State in the Union would be willing to receive them—or a considerable portion of them—into her dominions. They would be regarded as pests, and, if possible, everywhere expelled from the empires of freemen.
Our lands, like those of the British West Indies, would become almost valueless for the want of laborers to cultivate them. The most beautiful garden-spots of the sunny South would, in the course of a few years, be turned into a jungle, with only here and there a forlorn plantation. Poverty and distress, bankruptcy and ruin, would everywhere be seen. In one word, the condition of the Southern States would, in all material respects, be like that of the once flourishing British colonies in which the fatal experiment of emancipation has been tried.
Such are some of the fearful consequences of emancipation. But these are not all. The ties that would be severed, and the sympathies crushed, by emancipation, are not at all understood by abolitionists. They are, indeed, utter strangers to the moral power which these ties and sympathies now exert for the good of the inferior race. "Our patriarchal scheme of domestic servitude," says Governor Hammond, "is indeed well calculated to awaken the higher and finer feelings of our nature. It is not wanting in its enthusiasm and its poetry. The relations of the most beloved and honored chiefs, and the most faithful and admiring subjects, which, from the time of Homer, have been the theme of song, are frigid and unfelt, compared with those existing between the master and his slaves; who served his father, and rocked his cradle, or have been born in his household, and look forward to serve his children; who have been through life the props of his fortune, and the objects of his care; who have partaken of his griefs, and looked to him for comfort in their own; whose sickness he has so frequently watched over and relieved; whose holidays he has so often made joyous by his bounties and his presence; for whose welfare, when absent, his anxious solicitude never ceases, and whose hearty and affectionate greetings never fail to welcome him home. In this cold, calculating, ambitious world of ours, there are few ties more heart-felt, or of more benignant influence, than those which mutually bind the master and the slave, under our ancient system, handed down from the father of Israel."