NORTHERN INVASIONS.
Northern Invasions, when successful, advance the civilization of the world.
It would not be difficult to present from all history a mass of illustrations of this thesis wellnigh sufficient in themselves to establish it. And there is no doubt that the principles of human nature, which appear in those illustrations, can be set in such order as to prove the thesis beyond a question. The softness of Southern climates produces, in the long run, gentleness, effeminacy, and indolence, or passionate rather than persevering effort. It produces, again, the palliatives or disguises of these traits which are found in formal religions, and in institutions of caste or slavery. The rigor of Northern climates produces, on the other hand, in the long run, hardy physical constitutions among men, with determined individuality of character. It produces, therefore, freedom even to democracy in politics, protestantism even to rationalism in religion, and grim perseverance even to the bitter end in war. A certain stern morality, often amounting to asceticism, is imposed on Northern constitutions. So superficial is it, so much a creature of circumstance, that Norman, Scandinavian, Goth, or Icelander, deserves no sort of credit for it. All history shows that it vanishes before the temptations of any Vinland which the frozen barbarians stumble upon. None the less does it give them vigor of muscle, and power to endure hardship, which, in the end, tells, over the accomplishments of the most warlike Romans, Greeks, Persians, or other Southrons. "Fight us, if you like," said Ariovistus to Cæsar; "but remember that none of us have slept under a roof for fourteen years." That sort of people are apt to succeed in the long run.
When they succeed, as we have said, they advance civilization. To begin with the farthest East, all such strength as the Chinese Empire has to-day is due to the Tartar cross in its blood; that is, it results from the conquest of imbecile China by Northern Tartar tribes. One or two more such invasions, followed by colonization of Northern emigrants, would have made China a much stronger power this day than she is, and a nation of higher grade. The history of Indian civilization, again, is a history of Northern conquests. They tell us, indeed, that the Indian castes may be resolved into so many beach-marks of the waves of successive invasions from the North, the highest caste representing the last innovation. When Abraham crossed from Ur of the Chaldees into Canaan, when Cambyses broke open the secrets of Egyptian civilization, when Alexander first opened to the world Egyptian science, these were illustrations of the same thing,—Canaan, Egypt, and the world were all improved by those processes. Greece died out, and has never yet reëstablished herself, because she never had a complete infusion of Gothic blood in her worn-out system. Italy, on the other hand, had a new birth, and at this moment has a magnificent future, because Goths and Lombards did sweep in upon her with their up-country virtues and wilderness moralities. What the Ostrogoths did for Spain, what the Franks did for Gaul, what the Northmen did for England, are so many more illustrations. What Gustavus Adolphus would have done for Germany, if he had succeeded, would have been another.
What we are to do in the South, when we succeed, will be another. It makes the subject of this paper.
Nobody pretends, of course, that War itself does anything final in the advance of civilization. War itself is, what the poets call it, a terrible piece of ploughing. With us, just now, it is subsoil-ploughing, very deep at that. Stumps and stones have to be heaved out, which had on them the moss and lichens and superficial soil of centuries, and which had fancied, in that heavy semi-consciousness which belongs to stumps and stones, that they were fixed forever. As the teams and the ploughshares pass over the ground which has lain fallow so long, they leave, God knows, and millions of bleeding hearts know, a very desolate prospect in the upheaved furrows behind them. It is very black, very rough, very desert to the eye, and in spots it is very bloody. This is what war does. So desolate the prospect, that we of the Northern States have certainly a right to thank God that it was not we who called out the ploughmen.
War, in itself, does nothing but plough,—but immediately on the end of the war, in any locality, he who succeeds begins on the harrowing and the planting. And because God is, and directs all such affairs, it is wonderful to see how short is the June which in His world covers all such furrows as His ploughmen make with new beauty. It is to the methods of that new harvest that the President has boldly led our attention in his admirable Proclamation of Amnesty. It is to the details of it that each loyal man has to look already. It is but a few weeks since we heard a sentimental grumbler, at a public meeting, lamenting over the discomforts of the freed slaves in the Southwest, as he compared them with their lost paradise. Men of his type, to whom the present is always worse than the past, succeed in persuading themselves that the incidental hardships of transition are to be taken as the type of a whole future. And so this apostle of discontent really believed that the condition of the fifty thousand freed slaves of the Mississippi, in the hands of such men as Grant, and Eliot, and Yeatman, and Wheelock, and Forman, and Fiske, and Howard, was really going to be worse than it was under the lashes of Legree, or at the auction-block of New Orleans. The more manly, as the more philosophical way of looking at the transition, is to discover the shortest path leading to that future, which, without such a transition, cannot come.