8 orphanage into thousands of the homes of a sister Republic, the homes of men and women who never injured us. It has been made to carry widowhood and orphanage into thousands of our own American homes—to write a chapter in our history for the execration and loathing of the civilized and Christian world, and the bitter shame of our own wiser posterity. Of a system which leads to such political results—for, following the gentleman from North Carolina, I have not spoken of it as a question of justice or humanity —that gentleman is the elaborate apologist, and the gentleman from Maryland thinks that it ought to be regarded with respect and deference. The gentleman from North Carolina said, (pages 5, 6,) that it is miscalled a “peculiar institution,” for that it is “natural among men,” and prevails widely throughout the earth. I think he has been reading Rousseau, and learned from his fantastic dreams that the savage state is the natural and blissful state of man. Rather he has been reading Hobbes, and has adopted from that vigorous champion of arbitrary power the doctrine that might makes right, and in his school has contracted a love for slavery and force, and all that condition of humanity which in his nervous but not dainty language the philosopher describes as “without arts, without letters, without manners, without society, and the life of man solitary, disturbed, nasty, brutish, and short.” I am not so forgetful of the state of things in the ancient republics, and in the cultivated communities of the southern section of this country, as to affirm that slavery cannot co-exist with a high civilization. But they have no natural or proper affinity. It is only by force of earlier events that they are brought into contact. Slavery is natural to man, just as it is natural to him to drape himself with fig leaves and bear-skins. As his rude nature is developed, he invents better arts, and tends to a better culture. I know not but it was natural to man, as the Scottish philosopher of the last century maintained, to go on all-fours, and climb trees to regale on acorns. But in the progress of ages he has learned to do better. Liberty, justice, humanity, are natural to man, just as it is natural to him to learn to calculate eclipses, and build marble palaces, and make books of science and poetry, and surround himself with the charms and graces of a refined society. And where is slavery the “practice of mankind ?” Among the highly cultivated communities of the race ? In England ? In France ? Or in Mozambique and Guinea ? Sweden, Holland, and Denmark, have at length closed the procession of the civilized nations that have abandoned it. Out of these United States, I know not that it exists in any part of Christendom, except Brazil and the Spanish colonies. And in those colonies its form is much milder than with us. Of its condition in half-civilized Brazil I cannot speak. Again: The gentleman urged, to this point, the natural inferiority of the negro race, (page 7.) He has no doubt examined, and knows how to expose, the seeming paradox of those ingenious men who have held that the balance of power was shifted, and the sceptre of the world passed from the colored to the white race, some twenty-four centuries ago, at the capture of Babylon by the Persians; and I presume he decides that question rightly. [Mr. Clingman interrupted, and was understood to say he had referred to ' the Egyptians, and relied on the formation of the Egyptian skull.] The gentleman speaks of the Egyptians. Undoubtedly he has attended to the curious hint in Herodotus, bearing on that question. The gentleman quotes Appian, a writer not commonly in the hands of professed, scholars. He is a reader of Polybius, and has weighed his merits, and those of the other great masters in that department of composition in such exact critical scales as to feel justified in placing him-at the head of'the list in respect to political sagacity, (page 6.) He cannot have overlooked that singular passage in so common an author as Herodotus, in which the old chronicler has been thought to say, that the ancient Egyptians, the remote source perhaps of Greek civilization, were woolly-headed negroes. I will not defend that interpretation of his words. But
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=