I cannot help fancying that it will occur to some that by substituting slavery-shriekers and Bible-perverters in this sentence, it might at least equally well describe Northern pro-slavery zealots. At any rate, your language is the very extravagance of coarse pro-slavery fanaticism. I have never been of mind with those you term radical Abolitionists; but it seems to me that of the two fanaticisms, the anti-slavery fanaticism is the most respectable in principle, less selfish, and more generous in impulse. I have all my life been disposed to leave the South in undisturbed possession of its constitutional pound of slavery flesh. But when the slaveholders showed an inveterate determination not to be content with that, but to nationalize slavery, to carry it everywhere, and to make it the great element of political control throughout the nation, I felt no constitutional obligation to submit. And when the conspirators, foiled in their designs, rushed into open rebellion, I made up my mind that slavery had best be destroyed—for only when it is, will the conditions of true unity between the South and the North begin to exist—then only will the prosperity and peace of the nation be established on a permanent basis. This is now the opinion of a great many of the best and wisest men at the South. I believe that slavery will be destroyed in the progress and sequel of this war—to the ultimate incalculable advantage of the South.
One word more: You have seen fit to quote Burke and Milton, for the sake of a fling at the clergy who venture to discuss the questions of the day. I do not know how far some of your associates will be disposed to thank you. Perhaps their being on your side gives them a capacity not possessed by the others, and exempts them from the application of your rebuke. I have an impression that the culture and habits of thinking of the members of the clerical profession do not particularly unfit them for taking just and sound views on the questions that agitate the public mind, and that their position—cutting them off from all offices and emoluments that are the objects of ambition to party politicians—gives them some special advantages for doing so. For myself, having all my life been devoted to study and thought on the great principles of social and moral order, I feel myself as well qualified, at least, to offer an opinion, as though I had been devoted to the mechanical application of the principles of physical science.
BUCKLE, DRAPER, AND THE LAW OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT.
FIRST PAPER.
So parallel are the lines of thought in Mr. Buckle's 'History of Civilization' and Professor Draper's 'Intellectual Development of Europe,' while they continue within the same limits in discussing the law of individual and social progress; and so exactly does the latter work resume the consideration of this law at the point where the English writer abandoned its further analysis, to commence to apply that which he had made to the history of various nations, that one might almost suppose the two authors had undertaken the task conjointly, and divided the work between them.
It was the purpose of Mr. Buckle, in his introduction, to ascertain the sources of social, and, incidentally, of individual development—the fundamental causes of human progression; and subsequently to verify the principles established, by tracing, in general outlines, the rise and advance of leading nations under their impulse. The basis upon which he started in his examination was this: 'That when we perform an action, we perform it in consequence of some motive or motives; that those motives are the results of some antecedents; and that, therefore, if we were acquainted with the whole of the antecedents, and with all the laws of their movements, we could with unerring certainty predict the whole of their immediate results.'
From this proposition the historian concludes 'that the actions of men, being determined solely by their antecedents, must, under precisely the same circumstances, always issue in precisely the same results. And as all antecedents are either in the mind or out of it, we clearly see that all the variations in the results—in other words, all the changes of which history is full, all the vicissitudes of the human race, their progress or their decay, their happiness or their misery—must be the fruit of a double action; an action of external phenomena upon the mind, and another action of the mind upon the phenomena.'
Mr. Buckle gives it as the result of his investigations concerning the relative influence of these two agencies: That external or physical laws have been most powerful in the earlier ages of the world, and among the most ignorant nations; that in proportion as knowledge increases, the power of this class of agencies diminishes, and that of mental laws becomes more predominant; that these latter are therefore the great motor forces of civilization, consisting of two parts, the moral and the intellectual, of which the latter are vastly superior as instruments of social advancement, stationary in their effects; finally, as the formal statement of the laws of human development, he says: