It is the destiny of the middle of the nineteenth century—well may we be forgiven, if we pronounce it with some pride—unhesitatingly to defend the African slave-trade, and to smile at what sickly philanthropists used to consider the unutterable woe, the unmeasured crime, and the diabolical hard-heartedness of that traffic. We have changed all this; and, to say the truth, it was high time to discover that the negro-trade forms a charming chapter in the history of Europe, and that the protracted efforts to put it down were unchristian and unstatesmanlike. Pitt, Roscoe, Wilberforce, Burke, Washington, Franklin, Madison, Adams, Lowndes,—puny names! short-sighted men! By the African slave-trade, creatures that are hardly deserving the name of men, on account of organic, intellectual, and moral incapacity, are forcibly carried into the regions of Christian religion and civilization, there to become civilized in spite of their unfitness for civilization. The mariners, usually occupied in risking life or health merely for the sake of base traffic and filthy lucre, are suddenly transformed into ministering agents of civilization and religion. It gives a priestly character to the captain of a slave-ship,—to him that is willing to break the laws of his country, even daring the gallows, for the benefit of the sable brother, and of his law-abiding conservative society. How different from those dark times when the poet could say, —Homo ignoto homini lupus est! The missionary only endeavors to carry the Church to Africa; the slave-trader carries Africa to the Church, to civilization, and to the auction-table.
There are but two more returns to truth and justice necessary,—the Inquisition and the Witch-Trials. These restored, we may safely congratulate ourselves on having regained the ground on which our race stood before the Reformation, that untoward event, whence all the mischief dates that has befallen man in the shape of human rights, liberty, and other deplorable things, as lately a grave writer—not a Catholic, nor a Jew either—gravely assured us. Gentle readers, let us not be impatient. Progress has been of late so rapid, that many of you, it is to be hoped, will yet have an opportunity of hailing the return of those two noble institutions, pro majore gloriâ Dei, for which they always existed, as long as chill and misty skepticism did not extinguish their glowing poetry. Ah! happy times! poetic age! when there existed not only "words that burn," but also laws that burned!
In the mean time, it may not be inappropriate to commence the consideration of a topic somewhat farther removed from us, but which, according to our humble opinion, ought not to remain wholly beyond the limits of a candid, liberal, and unprejudiced examination,—we mean the important question, Whether the choicest of all substances, the most delicate of all muscular texture, that substance of which kings, philosophers, policemen, and supporters of crinoline are fashioned by the plastic hand of Nature, ought forever to be excluded from the reproductive process of wasted energy and proportionably consumed nervous and cerebral fibre. Reader, do not shrink; grant us a patient ear. You do not know how rapidly you may change your own opinion and feelings. Do you not remember with what awe we first read in the "Almanach des Gourmands," that a certain sauce piquante was so fine that with it a man would eat his own mother? This was only twenty years ago; yet all of us, now, are helping a high-bred gentleman, trading, on a gigantic scale, in the bones of his great ancestor. What sublimity of peddling!
To those who say, It is unnatural to eat our friends, we would answer, that it is the office of civilization to remove us farther and farther from Nature. Analyze the present magnitude called Lady, and you can arithmetically state it, how little of it is nature-woman, and how much is hoop-civilization. To those, again, who object, that it is too primitive, we would reply, that the highest civilization is always a return to Nature, which is likewise exemplified by many of our ladies in the ball-room,—we mean by their upper portion.
But revenons à nos moutons. The Rev. Messrs. Williams and Calvert, missionaries, for many long years, among the Fijians, state, in their recently published work, that those unsophisticated children of Nature eat "long pig,"—as they call, with graceful humor, roast-man, in contradistinction to "short-pig," by which they designate our squealing fellow-roasters,—from three different motives.—When a chief has a gala-day, or desires to signal his arrival by a right royal feast, it is considered befitting to slaughter some men, to let the blood run in the path of royalty, and to have on the table some roast-homme. Our Captain Wilkins told us, years ago, that, for this roast-homme, a plump Fijiana, of some twelve or thirteen years, is preferred. They know very well what is good!—The second motive is hatred. When a Fijian mortally hates a person, he endeavors to kill him; and having killed the enemy, why should the victim not be eaten?—Lastly, it would seem that affectionate regard, especially for a favorite wife, sometimes rises to a mordant passion and an unconquerable longing for material assimilation,—so much so, that the loving husband roasts his Penelope, and neighbors are invited to participate in his better fourth or fifth, as the polygamic case may be. Perhaps, years after, when with less demonstrative nations the memory of the beloved one would have passed away, the Fijian Fidelio may smack his lips, and exclaim, with Petrarch's fervor,—
"Perchè Morte fura
Prima i migliori, e lascia star i rei:
Questa aspettata al regno degli Dei
Cosa bella mortal passa e non dura."
Now we are very anxious not to be misunderstood by our readers. In writing this paper, we do not mean to urge the reintroduction of Cannibalism among us at once. The public mind may not yet be ripe for it; but we desire to assist in placing the subject in its proper light, and in showing that an enlightened impartiality can find very much in defence of the Fijians,—more, indeed, than the Rev. Mr. Froude has been able to accumulate in favor of his wife-devouring hero,—or than Mr. Spratt can say in favor of humanization in general, and the breaking-up of the Union in particular, by the reopening of the African slave-trade,—or than our venerable chief-justice has contrived to say in favor of reintroducing slavery in conquered territory, where positive law had abolished or excluded it, by the abstract Constitution itself, proprio vigore, (not quite unlike a wagoner, it seems to us, that carries the soil of distant parts, ipsâ adhesione, as it sticks to his boots, into the tavern-room,) without special law, which even the ancient civilians very stupidly declared to be necessary. First, you will remember, it was passionately maintained that the Constitution of the United States does not know the Common Law; and now it is insisted that Common Law (so far as slavery is concerned) is as inherent in the Constitution as the black pigment is in the negro. You cannot wash it out; it inheres physiologically in the Constitution. I tell you, reader, we are fast people indeed; we travel fast in our opinions, with now and then a somerset for the delectation of the philosopher.
Let us sit down, and have a philosophical conversation; above all, let us discard sentiment, feeling,—what you call heart, and all that sort of thing. You know how much mischief Las Casas has done by allowing his feelings to interfere when the Spaniards roasted Indians, from what he chose to call diabolical lust of gold, and sheer, abstract cruelty. Poor Bishop! He belonged to the softs. Let us be philosophers, economists, and, above all, Constitutionalists. Some philosophers, indeed, have said that all idea of Right and Wrong, and the idea that there is a difference between the two, must needs, first of all, start from sentiment; but leave, I implore you, such philosophic fogyism behind you.
First, then, as to the principle of Right. It is a fact, that most tribes and races, probably all nations in their earliest days, have killed old and useless parents, and have eaten enemies, once slain,—perhaps friends, too. Some nations carried the eating of human flesh far down into their civilized periods and into recent times. The Spaniards found the civilized Aztecs enjoying their petits soupers of babes à la Tartare, or gorgeous dinners on fattened heroes aux truffes. Have you forgotten that from that fine Introduction to Prescott's "Conquest of Mexico" a flavor of roast "long pig" steams into our nostrils as from a royal kitchen? Eating our equals, therefore, is sound Common Law of all mankind, even more so than slavery, for it exists before slavery can be introduced. Slavery is introduced when the prisoner of war may be made to work,—when the tilling of the soil has commenced; though then not always; for we now know that slavery was introduced among the Greeks at a comparatively late period: but killing parents and eating enemies exists in the hunter's state, and at those periods when people find it hard work to obtain food, each one for himself, to keep even a starved body and a little bit of soul together. Chewing our neighbor is even better, for it is older Common Law, than the universal buying of a wife and consequent selling of daughters which exists even now over far the greater portion of the globe. We take it that our species began with eating itself without paying for the fare. Partaking of our neighbor precedes all lex scripta, all statute law, all constitutions. As to ourselves in particular, whose law is the English law, we know that the Druids sacrificed human beings to their gods; and every one knows full well, that man, when in gastronomic contact with the gods, always appropriates the most savory morsels and the largest portions of the sacrifice to himself, leaving to the ethereal taste of Jove or Tezcatlipoca the smell of some burnt bones or inwards. Yet there is no law on record abolishing human sacrifices. We know, indeed, that some Teutonic tribes, when they adopted Christianity, positively prohibited the eating of horse-flesh, but no law ever forbade to honor our fathers and mothers by making them parts of our feasts; so that no lawyer of the true sort will deny, that, to this day, the right of sacrificing fellow-men, and the reasonable concomitant of eating the better portion of the sacrifice, still exists. Greeks and Romans have sacrificed men; why should not we? That men have their individual rights is no valid objection. Rights depend exclusively upon the law; and the law, we have shown, does not grant equal rights (at least, not equal destinations) to the Eater and the Eatee; for it seems to be one thing to eat, and another to be eaten. It was a very silly maxim of the ancient Civil Law, That the law, the regula, is derived from the right (jus), not the jus from the law. Has not a Supreme Court in one of our States lately denied to a negro even the right to choose between liberty and slavery,—the choice being left to him by his deceased master,—because the creature (which, when doing wrong, is responsible and has a will imputed to him) has no will to choose, because it cannot have any, says the Supreme Court of that State?
However, it will doubtless be objected by some, that it is simply disgusting to eat our fellow-creatures of the same species,—that it is unnatural and against our religion,—and that so remarkable a diversity of taste can be explained only on the ground of our belonging to different races. We do not believe that the Fijians belong to a different race. Fijian, or Fijician, results, by a slight change of letters, from the word Phoenician; and there can be no doubt that the Fijians are descendants of those Phoenicians who, according to Herodotus, sailed, in the reign of the Egyptian King Necho, from the Persian Gulf round the Cape of Good Hope, and entered the Mediterranean through the Pillars of Hercules. How they came to be wafted to the opposite hemisphere is not for us to explain, nor do we know it. Suffice it to say, that Fijician and Phoenician are the same word. Possibly old Admiral Hanno preceded Captain Cook. Who can prove the contrary?