Cannibals all! Part 4

The rules of art destroy art. Homer never could have produced the Iliad, had he learned grammar and rhetoric and criticism. 'Tis well for the world, he lived before Longinus. Euripides, Sophocles, and Aristophanes, and the Greek Masters in Sculpture and Painting, knew nothing of the rules of art and canons of criticism. Without the modern helps to art, Grecian art so far excelled ours, that it is a popular theory that they possessed an Ideal that has been lost. Early in the days of the Roman Empire, the rhetoricians, by attempting to teach eloquence by rule, so corrupted it, that the Emperors found it necessary to banish them from Rome.

We are no doubt indebted to the ignorance of the ancients for the invention of Gothic architecture. No one taught to reverence Greek architecture, would have violated its rules by imitating the Gothic.

When about the time of the Reformation, the study of the ancients was revived, each Gothic spire stopped half way in its course towards heaven. Mediaeval art expired:--and now the world has no art, but basely copies the past.

Had Shakspeare been as learned as Ben Jonson, he would have written no better than Ben Jonson. The lofty genius of Milton would have created a glorious English epic, had he not travelled too much abroad, and dwelt too much with the past. The Paradise Lost is a splendid piece of Mosaic, made up of bits of Greek and Roman mythology, Hebrew theology, Christian morality, Mediaeval romance, set in the purest Anglo-Saxon, twisted into Latin collocation. 'Tis the song of the mocking-bird.

What, then? Shall we not in boyhood sojourn and linger at Athens and at Rome, nor in manhood travel into France and Italy?

_Est modus in rebus._ Study the past, but be careful not to copy it, and never travel abroad until age has matured your love and respect for your native land.

CHAPTER VII.

THE WORLD IS _TOO LITTLE_ GOVERNED.

Whether with reason or with instinct blest, All enjoy that power that suits them best; Order is Heaven's first law, and this confessed, Some are, and must be greater than the rest-- More rich, more wise; but who infers from hence That such are happier, shocks all common sense.

Heaven to mankind impartial, we confess, If all are equal in their happiness; But mutual wants this happiness increase, All nature's difference, keeps all nature's peace: Condition, circ.u.mstance, is not the thing; Bliss is the same, in subject, or in king!

POPE.

Mobs, secret a.s.sociations, insurance companies, and social and communistic experiments, are striking features and characteristics of our day, outside of slave society. They are all attempting to supply the defects of regular governments, which have carried the "Let alone"

practice so far, that one-third of mankind are let alone to indulge in such criminal immoralities as they please, and another third to starve.

Mobs (_vide_ California) supply the deficiencies of a defective police, and insurance companies and voluntary unions and a.s.sociations afford that security and protection which government, under the lead of political economy, has ceased to render.

A lady remarked to us, a few days since, "that society was like an army, in which the inferior officers were as necessary as the commander-in-chief. Demoralization and insubordination ensue if you dispense with sergeants and corporals in an army, and the same effects result from dispensing with guardians, masters and heads of families in society." We don't know whether she included the ladies in her ideas of the heads of families; protesting against such construction of her language, we accept and thank her for her ill.u.s.tration. Rev'd Nehemiah Adams has a similar thought in his admirable work, "A Southside View of Slavery," which we regret is not before us. On some public occasion in Charleston, he was struck with the good order and absence of all dissipation, and very naively asked where was their mob. He was informed that "they were at work." He immediately perceived that slavery was an admirable police inst.i.tution, and moralizes very wisely on the occasion.

Slavery is an indispensable police inst.i.tution;--especially so, to check the cruelty and tyranny of vicious and depraved husbands and parents.

Husbands and parents have, in theory and practice, a power over their subjects more despotic than kings; and the ignorant and vicious exercise their power more oppressively than kings. Every man is not fit to be king, yet all must have wives and children. Put a master over them to check their power, and we need not resort to the unnatural remedies of woman's rights, limited marriages, voluntary divorces, and free love, as proposed by the abolitionists.

Mr. Carlyle says, "Among practical men the idea prevails that government can do nothing but 'keep the peace.' They say all higher tasks are unsafe for it, impossible for it, and, in fine, not necessary for it or for us. Truly, it is high time that same beautiful notion of No-Government should take itself away. The world is daily rus.h.i.+ng towards wreck whilst it lasts. If your government is to be a const.i.tuted anarchy, what issue can it have? Our own interest in such government is, that it would be kind enough to cease and go its way before the inevitable wreck."

The reader will excuse us for so often introducing the thoughts and words of others. We do so not only for the sake of their authority, but because they express our own thoughts better than we can express them ourselves. In truth, we deal out our thoughts, facts and arguments in that irregular and desultory way in which we acquired them. We are no regular built scholar--have pursued no "royal road to mathematics," nor to anything else. We have, by observation and desultory reading, picked up our information by the wayside, and endeavored to arrange, generalize and digest it for ourselves. To learn "to forget," is almost the only thing we have labored to learn. We have been so bored through life by friends with dyspeptic memories, who never digest what they read, because they never forget it, who retain on their intellectual stomachs in gross, crude, undigested, and una.s.similated form, every thing that they read, and retail and repeat it in that undigested form to every good-natured listener: we repeat, that we have been so bored by friends with good memories, that we have resolved to endeavor to express what was useful out of facts, and then to throw the facts away. A great memory is a disease of the mind, which we are surprised no medical writer has noticed. The lunatic asylum should make provision for those affected with this disease; for, though less dangerous, they are far more troublesome and annoying than any other cla.s.s of lunatics.

Learning, observation, reading, are only useful in the general, as they add to the growth of the mind. Undigested and unforgotten, they can no more have this effect, than undigested food on the stomach of a dyspeptic can add to his physical stature. We thought once this thing was original with us, but find that Say pursued this plan in writing his Political Economy. He first read all the books he could get hold of on this subject, and then took time to forget them, before he began to write.

We will not trouble the reader further, for the present, with our egotisms or our arguments, but refer him to the whole of Carlyle's "Latter Day Pamphlets," to prove that "the world is too little governed," and, therefore, is going to wreck. We say, to the whole of those pamphlets, for that is their one, great leading idea. We also add an extract from the speech of Ulysses, in the play of Troilus and Cressida, that beautifully ill.u.s.trates and enforces our thought. We give the extract because it is a play that few read, it being, on the whole, far inferior to Shakspeare's other plays, and by few considered as wholly, if at all, his work:

"The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre, Observe degree, priority, and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office and custom, in all line of order: And, therefore, is the glorious planet, Sol, In n.o.bler eminence enthron'd and spher'd Amidst the other; whose med'cinable eye Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil, And posts, like the commandment of a king, Sans check, to good and bad: But, when the planets, In evil mixture, to disorder wander, What plagues, and what portents? what mutiny?

What raging of the sea? shaking of earth?

Commotion in the winds? frights, changes, horrors, Divert and crack, rend and deracinate, The unity and married calm of states Quite from their fixture? O, when degree is shak'd, Which is the ladder of all high designs, The enterprise is sick! How could communities, Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities, Peaceful commerce from dividable sh.o.r.es, The primogenitive and due of birth, Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels, But by degree, stand in authentic place?

Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets In mere oppugnancy: The bounded waters Should lift their bosom's higher than the sh.o.r.es, And make a sop of all this solid globe: Strength should be lord of imbecility, And the rude son should strike his father dead: Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong.

(Between whose endless jar justice resides,) Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

We promised to write no more in this chapter; but, like Parthos, when "we have an idea," we want to give others the benefit of it. We agree with Mr. Jefferson, that all men have natural and inalienable rights. To violate or disregard such rights, is to oppose the designs and plans of Providence, and cannot "come to good." The order and subordination observable in the physical, animal and human world, show that some are formed for higher, others for lower stations--the few to command, the many to obey. We conclude that about nineteen out of every twenty individuals have "a natural and inalienable right" to be taken care of and protected; to have guardians, trustees, husbands, or masters; in other words, they have a natural and inalienable right to be slaves. The one in twenty are as clearly born or educated, or some way fitted for command and liberty. Not to make them rulers or masters, is as great a violation of natural right, as not to make slaves of the ma.s.s. A very little individuality is useful and necessary to society,--much of it begets discord, chaos and anarchy.

NOTE.--Since writing this chapter, we have received our copy of Mr.

Adams's work. We congratulate ourselves on our success in "learning to forget." Here is the pa.s.sage to which we refer:

"One consequence of the disposal of the colored people, as to individual control, is the absence of mobs. That fearful element in society, an irresponsible and low cla.s.s, is diminished at the South. Street brawls and conflicts between two races of laboring people, or the ignorant and more excitable portions of different religious denominations, are mostly unknown within the bounds of slavery. Our great source of disturbance at the North, jealousy and collisions between Protestant and Irish Roman Catholic laborers, is obviated there.

"When the remains of Mr. Calhoun were brought to Charleston, a gentleman from a free State in the procession said to a southern gentleman, "Where is your underswell?" referring to the motley crowd of men and boys of all nations which gather in most of our large places on public occasions. He was surprised to learn that those respectable, well-dressed, well-behaved colored men and boys on the sidewalks, were a subst.i.tute for that cla.s.s of population which he had elsewhere been accustomed to see with repugnant feelings on public occasions."

As we are on the subject of Mr. Adams's book, we will give another extract from it, confirmatory of our doctrines:

"There is another striking peculiarity of Southern society which is attributable to slavery, and is very interesting to a Northerner at the present day. While the colored people are superst.i.tious and excitable, popular delusions and fanaticisms do not prevail among them. That cla.s.s of society among us in which these things get root, has a subst.i.tute in the colored population.

Spiritual rappings, biology, second-adventism, Mormonism, and the whole sp.a.w.n of errors which infest us, do not find subjects at the South. There is far more faith in the South, taken as a whole, than with us. Many things which we feel called to preach against here are confined to the boundaries of the Free States; yet the white population are readers of books, though not of newspapers, perhaps more generally than we. That vast amount of active but uninstructed mind with us, which seizes every new thing, and follows brilliant or specious error, and erects a folly into a doctrine with a sect annexed, and so infuses doubt or contempt of things sacred into many minds, is no element in Southern life.

This is one reason why there is more faith, less infidelity, at the South, than at the North. The opinions of a lower cla.s.s on moral and religious subjects, have a powerful effect on the cla.s.ses above them; more than is generally acknowledged; and hence we derive an argument in favor of general education, in which moral and religious principles shall have their important place."

CHAPTER VIII.

LIBERTY AND SLAVERY.

Effugit imago, Par livibus ventis, volueri que simillima somno.

It seems to us that the vain attempts to define liberty in theory, or to secure its enjoyment in practice, proceed from the fact that man is naturally a social and gregarious animal, subject, not by contract or agreement, as Locke and his followers a.s.sume, but by birth and nature, to those restrictions of liberty which are expedient or necessary to secure the good of the human hive, to which he may belong. There is no such thing as _natural human_ liberty, because it is unnatural for man to live alone and without the pale and government of society. Birds, and beasts of prey, who are not gregarious, are naturally free. Bees and herds are naturally subjects or slaves of society. Such is the theory of Aristotle, promulged more than two thousand years ago, generally considered true for two thousand years, and destined, we hope, soon again to be accepted as the only true theory of government and society.

Modern social reformers, except Mr. Carlyle, proceeding upon the theory of Locke, which is the opposite of Aristotle, propose to dissolve and disintegrate society; falsely supposing that they thereby follow nature.

There is not a human tie that binds man to man, that they do not propose to cut "sheer asunder." 'Tis true, after their work of destruction is finished, they see the necessity of society; but instead of that natural and historical society, which has usually existed in the world, with its gradations of rank and power, its families and its slaves, they propose wholly to disregard the natural relations of mankind, and profanely to build up states, like Fourierite Phalansteries, or Mormon and Oneida villages, where religion shall be banished, and in which property, wife and children shall be held somewhat in common. These social establishments, under a self-elected despotism like that of Joe Smith, or Brigham Young, become patriarchal, and succeed, so long as such despotism lasts. That is, when the a.s.sociation loses the character intended by its founders, and acquires a despotic head like other family a.s.sociations, it works well, because it works naturally. But this success can only be temporary; for nothing but the strong rule of a Cromwell or Joe Smith can keep a society together, that wants the elements of cohesion, in the natural ties that bind man to man: and Cromwells and Joe Smiths are not to be found every day.

'Tis an historical fact, that this family a.s.sociation, this patriarchal government, for purposes of defence against enemies from without, gradually merges into larger a.s.sociations of men under a common government or ruler. This latter is the almost universal, and we may thence infer, natural and normal condition of civilized man. In this state of society there is no liberty for the ma.s.ses. Liberty has been exchanged by nature for security.

What is falsely called Free Society, is a very recent invention. It proposes to make the weak, ignorant and poor, free, by turning them loose in a world owned exclusively by the few (whom nature and education have made strong, and whom property has made stronger,) to get a living.

In the fanciful state of nature, where property is unappropriated, the strong have no weapons but superior physical and mental power with which to oppress the weak. Their power of oppression is increased a thousand fold, when they become the exclusive owners of the earth and all the things thereon. They are masters without the obligations of masters, and the poor are slaves without the rights of slaves.

It is generally conceded, even by abolitionists, that the serfs of Europe were liberated because the mult.i.tude of laborers, and their compet.i.tion as freemen to get employment, had rendered free labor cheaper than slave labor. But, strange to say, few seem to have seen that this is in fact a.s.serting that they were less free after emanc.i.p.ation than before. Their obligation to labor was increased; for they were compelled to labor more than before to obtain a livelihood, else their free labor would not have been cheaper than their labor as slaves. They lost something in liberty, and everything in rights--for emanc.i.p.ation liberated or released the masters from all their burdens, cares and liabilities, whilst it increased both the labors and the cares of the liberated serf. In our chapter on the Decay of English Liberty, we show that the whole struggle in England has been to oppress the working man, pull down the powers, privileges and prerogatives of the throne, the n.o.bility, and the church, and to elevate the property-holding cla.s.s. The extracts from the Era and Northern Churchman, in another chapter, will further elucidate this subject. We promised to confirm our doctrine of the illusory and undefinable character of liberty and slavery, by extracts from standard authors.

PALEY on Civil Liberty:

"To do what we will, is natural liberty: to do what we will, consistently with the interest of the community to which we belong, is civil liberty; that is to say, the only liberty to be desired in a state of civil society.

I should wish, no doubt, to be allowed to act, in every instance, as I pleased; but I reflect, that the rest also of mankind would then do the same; in which state of universal independence and self-direction, I should meet with so many checks and obstacles to my own will, from the interference and opposition of other men's, that not only my happiness, but my liberty, would be less than whilst the whole community were subject to the dominion of equal laws.

The boasted liberty of a state of nature exists only in a state of solitude. In every kind and degree of union and intercourse with his species, it is possible that the liberty of the individual may be augmented by the very laws which restrain it; because he may gain more from the limitation of other men's freedom than he suffers by the diminution of his own. Natural liberty is the right of common upon a waste; civil liberty is the safe, exclusive, unmolested enjoyment of a cultivated enclosure.

The definitions which have been framed of civil liberty, and which have become the subject of much unnecessary altercation, are most of them adapted to this idea. Thus, one political writer makes the essence of the subject's liberty to consist in his being governed by no laws but those to which he hath actually consented; another is satisfied with an indirect and virtual consent; another, again, places civil liberty in the separation of the legislative and executive offices of government; another in the being governed by _law_; that is, by known, preconst.i.tuted, inflexible rules of action and adjudication; a fifth, in the exclusive right of the people to tax themselves by their own representatives; a sixth, in freedom and purity of elections of representatives; a seventh, in the control which the democratic part of the const.i.tution possesses over the military establishment."

MONTESQUIEU on Liberty:

"There is no word that has admitted of more various significations, and has made more different impressions on human minds, than that of _liberty_. Some have taken it for a faculty of deposing a person on whom they had conferred a tyrannical authority; others, for the power of choosing a person whom they are obliged to obey; others, for the right of bearing arms, and of being thereby enabled to use violence; others, for the privilege of being governed by a native of their own country, or by their own laws. A certain nation for a long time thought that liberty consisted in the privilege of wearing a long beard.