Sociology For The South
Or The Failure of Free Society:
Electronic Edition

Fitzhugh, George, 1806-1881

Call number E449 .F556 1854 (North Carolina Central University, Shepard Library)

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SOCIOLOGY FOR THE SOUTH,
OR THE
FAILURE OF FREE SOCIETY.

BY

GEORGE FITZHUGH.

THE THING THAT HAS BEEN, IT IS THAT WHICH SHALL BE; AND THAT WHICH IS DONE IS THAT WHICH SHALL BE DONE; AND THERE IS NO NEW THING UNDER THE SUN. - ECC. 1:9.

Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret.---Horace.

RICHMOND, VA.
A. MORRIS, PUBLISHER.
1854.

Entered according to an act of Congress, in the year 1854, by
GEORGE FITZHUGH,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for
the Eastern District of Virginia.
C.H. WYNNE, PRINTER, RICHMOND.

TO THE PEOPLE OF THE SOUTH.

        From some peculiarity of taste, we have for many years been watching closely the perturbed workings of free society. Its crimes, its revolutions, its sufferings and its beggary, have led us to investigate its past history, as well as to speculate on its future destiny. This pamphlet has been hastily written, but is the result of long observation, some research and much reflection. Should it contain suggestions that will enlist abler pens to show that free society is a failure and its philosophy false, our highest ambition will be gratified. Believing our positions on these subjects to be true, we feel sanguine they are destined to final vindication and triumph. We should have written a larger work, had not our inexperience in authorship warned

us that we had better await the reception of this. We may again appear in the character of writer before the public; but we shall not intrude, and would prefer that others should finish the work which we have begun. Treating subjects novel and difficult of comprehension, we have designedly indulged in iteration; for we preferred offending the ear and the taste of the readers to confounding or confusing him by insufficient elaboration. In truth, fine finish and rotundity are not easily attained in what is merely argumentative and controversial.

        On all subjects of social science, Southern men, from their position, possess peculiar advantages when they undertake discussion. History, past and cotemporaneous, informs them of all the phenomena of other forms of society, and they see every day around them the peculiarities and characteristics of slave society, of which little is to be learned from books. The ancients took it for granted that slavery was right, and never attempted to justify it. The moderns assume that it is wrong, and forthwith proceed to denounce it. The South can lose nothing, and may gain, by the discussion. She has, up to this time, been condemned without a hearing.

With respect, your fellow-citizen,
GEO. FITZHUGH.

PREFACE.

unknown amongst us. But as our book is intended to prove that we are indebted to domestic slavery for our happy exemption from the social afflictions that have originated this philosophy, it became necessary and appropriate that we should employ this new word in our title. The fact that, before the institution of Free Society, there was no such term, and that it is not in use in slave countries, now, shows pretty clearly that Slave Society, ancient and modern, has ever been in so happy a condition, so exempt from ailments, that no doctors have arisen to treat it of its complaints, or to propose remedies for their cure. The term, therefore, is not only appropriate to the subject and the occasion, but pregnantly suggestive of facts and arguments that sustain our theory.

CHAPTER I.

FREE TRADE.

who deal with little of the world and see less of it. Such men judge of mankind, their progress and their happiness, by the few specimens subjected to the narrow range of their experience and observation. After the abolition of feudalism and Catholicism, an immense amount of unfettered talent, genius, industry and capital, was brought into the field of free competition. The immediate result was, that all those who possessed either of those advantages prospered as they had never prospered before, and rose in social position and intelligence. At the same time, and from the same causes, the aggregate wealth of society, and probably its aggregate intelligence, were rapidly increased. Such was no doubt part of the effects of unfettering the limbs, the minds and consciences of men. It was the only part of those effects that scholars and philosophers saw or heeded. Here was something new under the sun, which refuted and rebuked the wisdom of Solomon. Up to this time, one-half of mankind had been little better than chattels belonging to the other half. A central power, with branches radiating throughout the civilized world, had trammeled men’s consciences, dictated their religious faith, and prescribed the forms and modes of worship. All this was done away with, and the new world just started into existence was certainly making rapid progress, and seemed to the ordinary observer

to be very happy. About such a world, nothing was to be found in books. Its social, its industrial and its moral phenomena, seemed to be as beautiful as they were novel. They needed, however, description, classification and arrangement. Men's social relations and moral duties were quite different under a system of universal liberty and equality of rights, from what they had been in a state of subordination and dependence on the one side, and of power, authority and protection on the other. The reciprocal duties and obligations of master and slave, of lord and vassal, of priest and layman, to each other, were altogether unlike those that should be practiced between the free and equal citizens of regenerated society. Men needed a moral guide, a new philosophy of ethics; for neither the sages of the Gentiles, nor the Apostles of Christianity, had foreseen or provided for the great light which was now to burst upon the world. Moses, and Solomon, and Paul, were silent as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, as to this social Millenium, and the moral duties and obligations it would bring in its train.

        Until now, industry had been controlled and directed by a few minds. Monopoly in its every form had been rife. Men were suddenly called on to walk alone, to act and work for themselves without guide, advice or control from superior

authority. In the past, nothing like it had occurred; hence no assistance could be derived from books. The prophets themselves had overlooked or omitted to tell of the advent of this golden era, and were no better guides than the historians and philosophers. Philosophy that should guide and direct industry was equally needed with a philosophy of morals. The occasion found and made the man. For writing a one-sided philosophy, no man was better fitted than Adam Smith. He possessed extraordinary powers of abstraction, analysis and generalization. He was absent, secluded and unobservant. He saw only that prosperous and progressive portion of society whom liberty or free competition benefitted, and mistook its effects on them for its effects on the world. He had probably never heard the old English adage, "Every man for himself, and Devil take the hindmost." This saying comprehends the whole philosophy, moral and economical, of the "Wealth of Nations." But he and the political economists who have succeeded him, seem never to have dreamed that there would have been any "hindmost." There can never be a wise moral philosopher, or a sound philosophy, till some one arises who sees and comprehends all the "things in heaven and earth." Philosophers are the most abstracted, secluded, and least observant of men. Their premises are always false, because they see

but few facts; and hence their conclusions must also be false. Plato and Aristotle have to-day as many believers as Smith, Paley or Locke, and between their times a hundred systems have arisen, flourished for a time, and been rejected. There is not a true moral philosophy, and from the nature of things there never can be. Such a philosophy has to discover first causes and ultimate effects, to grasp infinitude, to deal with eternity at both ends. Human presumption will often attempt this, but human intellect can never achieve it. We shall build up no system, attempt to account for nothing, but simply point out what is natural and universal, and humbly try to justify the ways of God to man.

        Adam Smith's philosophy is simple and comprehensive, (teres et rotundus.) Its leading and almost its only doctrine is, that individual well-being and social and national wealth and prosperity will be best promoted by each man's eagerly pursuing his own selfish welfare unfettered and unrestricted by legal regulations, or governmental prohibitions, farther than such regulations may be necessary to prevent positive crime. That some qualifications of this doctrine will not be found in his book, we shall not deny; but this is his system. It is obvious enough that such a governmental policy as this doctrine would result in, would stimulate energy, excite invention and

industry, and bring into livelier action, genius, skill and talent. It had done so before Smith wrote, and it was no doubt the observation of those effects that suggested the theory. His friends and acquaintances were of that class, who, in the war of the wits to which free competition invited, were sure to come off victors. His country, too, England and Scotland, in the arts of trade and in manufacturing skill, was an over-match for the rest of the world. International free trade would benefit his country as much as social free trade would benefit his friends. This was his world, and had it been the only world his philosophy would have been true. But there was another and much larger world, whose misfortunes, under his system, were to make the fortunes of his friends and his country. A part of that world, far more numerous than his friends and acquaintance was at his door, they were the unemployed poor, the weak in mind or body, the simple and unsuspicious, the prodigal, the dissipated, the improvident and the vicious. Laissez-faire and pas trop gouverner suited not them; one portion of them needed support and protection; the other, much and rigorous government. Still they were fine subjects out of which the astute and designing, the provident and avaricious, the cunning, the prudent and the industrious might make fortunes in the field of free

competition. Another portion of the world which Smith overlooked, were the countries with which England traded, covering a space many hundred times larger than England herself. She was daily growing richer, more powerful and intellectual, by her trade, and the countries with which she traded poorer, weaker, and more ignorant. Since the vast extension of trade, consequent on the discoveries of Columbus and Vasco de Gama, the civilized countries of Europe which carried on this trade had greatly prospered, but the savages and barbarians with whom they traded had become more savage and barbarous or been exterminated. Trade is a war of the wits, in which the stronger witted are as sure to succeed as the stronger armed in a war with swords. Strength of wit has this great advantage over strength of arm, that it never tires, for it gathers new strength by appropriating to itself the spoils of the vanquished. And thus, whether between nations or individuals, the war of free trade is constantly widening the relative abilities of the weak and the strong. It has been justly observed that under this system the rich are continually growing richer and the poor poorer. The remark is true as well between nations as between individuals. Free trade, when the American gives a bottle of whiskey to the Indian for valuable furs, or the Englishman exchanges with the African

blue-beads for diamonds, gold and slaves, is a fair specimen of all free trade when unequals meet. Free trade between England and Ireland furnishes the latter an excellent market for her beef and potatoes, in exchange for English manufactures. The labor employed in manufacturing pays much better than that engaged in rearing beeves and potatoes. On the average, one hour of English labor pays for two of Irish. Again, manufacturing requires and encourages skill and intelligence; grazing and farming require none. But far the worst evils of this free trade remain to be told. Irish pursuits depressing education and refinement, England becomes a market for the wealth, the intellect, the talent, energy and enterprise of Ireland. All men possessing any of these advantages or qualities retreat to England to spend their incomes, to enter the church, the navy, or the army, to distinguish themselves as authors, to engage in mechanic or manufacturing pursuits. Thus is Ireland robbed of her very life's blood, and thus do our Northern States rob the Southern.

        Under the system of free trade a fertile soil, with good rivers and roads as outlets, becomes the greatest evil with which a country can be afflicted. The richness of soil invites to agriculture, and the roads and rivers carry off the crops, to be exchanged for the manufactures of

poorer regions, where are situated the centres of trade, of capital and manufactures. In a few centuries or less time the consumption abroad of the crops impoverishes the soil where they are made. No cities or manufactories arise in the country with this fertile soil, because there is no occasion. No pursuits are carried on requiring intelligence or skill; the population is of necessity sparse, ignorant and illiterate; universal absenteeism prevails; the rich go off for pleasure and education, the enterprising poor for employment. An intelligent friend suggests that, left to nature, the evil will cure itself. So it may when the country is ruined, if the people, like those of Georgia, are of high character, and betake themselves to other pursuits than mere agriculture, and totally repudiate free trade doctrines. Our friends’ objection only proves the truth of our theory. We are very sure that the wit of man can devise no means so effectual to impoverish a country as exclusive agriculture. The ravages of war, pestilence and famine are soon effaced; centuries are required to restore an exhausted soil. The more rapidly money is made in such a country, enjoying free trade, the faster it is impoverished, for the draft on the soil is greater, and those who make good crops spend them abroad; those who make small ones, at home. In the absence of free trade, this rich

region must manufacture for itself, build cities, erect schools and colleges, and carry on all the pursuits and provide for all the common wants of civilized man. Thus the money made at home would be spent and invested at home; the crops would be consumed at home, and each town and village would furnish manure to fertilize the soil around it. We believe it is a common theory that, without this domestic consumption, no soil can be kept permanently rich. A dense population would arise, because it would be required; the rich would have no further occasion to leave home for pleasure, nor the poor for employment.

        The valley of the Great Salt Lake is cut off by mountains from the rest of the world, except for travel. Suppose it to continue so cut off, and to be settled by a virtuous, enlightened people. Every trade, every art, every science, must be taught and practiced within a small compass and by a small population, in order to gratify their wants and their tastes. The highest, most diffused and intense civilization, with great accumulation of wealth, would be the necessary result. But let a river like the Mississippi pass through it. Let its inhabitants become merely agricultural, and exchange their products for the manufactures of Europe and the fruits of Asia, and would not that civilization soon disappear, and with it

the wealth and capital of the country? Mere agriculture requires no skill or education, few and cheap houses, and no permanent outlay of capital in the construction of the thousand edifices needed in a manufacturing country. Besides, the consumption of the crops abroad would be cheating their lands of that manure which nature intended for them. Soon the rich and enlightened, who owned property there, would, like Irish landlords, live and spend their incomes elsewhere.

        The profits of exclusive agriculture are not more than one-third of those realized from commerce and manufactures. The ordinary and average wages of laborers employed in manufactures and mechanic trades are about double those of agricultural laborers; but, moreover, women and children get good wages in manufacturing countries, whose labor is lost in agricultural ones. But this consideration, great as it is, shrinks to insignificance compared with the intellectual superiority of all other pursuits over agriculture.

        The centralizing effects of free trade alone would be sufficient to condemn it. The decline of civilization under the Roman Empire was owing solely to centralization. If political science has at all advanced since the earliest annals of history, that advance is the discovery that each small section knows best its own interests,

and should be endowed with the most of the functions of government. The ancients, in the days of Herodotus, when the country around the Levant and the Islands in the Mediterranean were cut up into hundreds of little highly enlightened independent States, seem to have understood the evils of centralization quite as well a the moderns. At least their practice was wiser than ours, whatever may have been their theory. Political independence is not worth a fig without commercial independence. The tribute which the centres of trade, of capital, and of mechanical and artistic skill, such as England and the North exact from the nations they trade with, is more onerous and more destructive of civilization than that exacted from conquered provinces. Its effects everywhere are too obvious to need the citation of proofs and instances. Social centralization arises from the laissez-faire system just as national centralization. A few individuals possessed of capital and cunning acquire a power to employ the laboring class on such terms as they please, and they seldom fail to use that power. Hence, the numbers and destitution of the poor in free society are daily increasing, the numbers of the middle or independent class diminishing, and the few rich men growing hourly richer.

        Free trade occasions a vast and useless, probably a very noxious waste of capital and labor,

in exchanging the productions of different and distant climes and regions. Furs and oils are not needed at the South, and the fruits of the tropics are tasteless and insipid at the North. Providence has wonderfully adapted the productions of each section to the wants of man and other animals inhabiting those sections. It is probable, if the subject were scientifically investigated, it would be found that the productions of one clime when used in another are injurious and deleterious. The intercourse of travel and the interchange of ideas it occasions advances civilization. The intercourse of trade, by accustoming barbarous, savage and agricultural countries to depend daily more and more on the centres of trade and manufactures for their supplies of every thing requiring skill or science for its production, rapidly depresses civilization. On the whole subject of civilization there is a prevalent error. Man's necessities civilize him, or rather the labor, invention and ingenuity needed to supply them. Relieve him of the necessity to exert those qualities by supplying through trade or other means his wants, and he at once begins to sink into barbarism. Wars are fine civilizers, for all men dread violent death; hence, among barbarians, the implements of warfare are far superior to any other of their manufactures, but they lead the way to other improvements. The

old adage, that "necessity is the mother of invention," contains our theory; for invention alone begets civilization. Civilization is no foreign hotbed exotic brought from distant climes. but a hardy plant of indigenous birth and growth. There never was yet found a nation of white savages; their wants and their wits combine to elevate them above the savage state. Nature, that imposed more wants on them, has kindly endowed them with superior intelligence to supply those wants.

        Political economy is quite as objectionable, viewed as a rule of morals, as when viewed as a system of economy. Its authors never seem to be aware that they are writing an ethical as well as an economical code; yet it is probable that no writings, since the promulgation of the Christian dispensation, have exercised so controlling an influence on human conduct as the writings of these authors. The morality which they teach is one of simple and unadulterated selfishness. The public good, the welfare of society, the prosperity of one's neighbors, is, according to them, best promoted by each man's looking solely to the advancement of his own pecuniary interests. They maintain that national wealth, happiness and prosperity being but the aggregate of individual wealth, happiness and prosperity, if each man pursues exclusively his own selfish good, he

is doing the most he can to promote the general good. They seem to forget that men eager in the pursuit of wealth are never satisfied with the fair earnings of their own bodily labor, but find their wits and cunning employed in overreaching others much more profitable than their hands. Laissez-faire, free competition begets a war of the wits, which these economists encourage, quite as destructive to the weak, simple and guileless, as the war of the sword.

        In a book on society, evincing much power and originality of thought, by Stephen Pearl Andrews, this subject is well handled. We annex a short extract: "It follows, from what has been said, that the value principle is the commercial embodiment of the essential element of conquest and war - war transferred from the battle-field to the counter - none the less opposed, however, to the spirit of christian morality, or the sentiment of human brotherhood. In bodily conflict, the physically strong conquer and subject the physically weak. In the conflict of trade, the intellectually astute and powerful conquer and subject those who are intellectually feeble, or whose intellectual development is not of the precise kind to fit them for the conflict of wits in the matter of trade. With the progress of civilization and development, we have ceased to think that superior strength gives the right of

conquest and subjugation. We have graduated in idea out of the period of physical dominion. We remain, however, as yet, in the period of intellectual conquest or plunder. It has not been questioned hitherto, as a general proposition, that the man who has superior intellectual endowments to others, has a right resulting therefrom to profit thereby at the cost of others. In the extreme applications of the admission only is the conclusion denied. (That is, as he had before said, 'You must not be too bad.' 'Don't gouge too deep.') In the whole field of what are denominated the legitimate operations of trade, there is no other law recognized than the relative 'smartness' or shrewdness of the parties, modified at most by the sentimental precept stated above."

        It begets another war in the bosom of society still more terrible than this. It arrays capital against labor. Every man is taught by political economy that it is meritorious to make the best bargains one can. In all old countries, labor is superabundant, employers less numerous than laborers; yet all the laborers must live by the wages they receive from the capitalists. The capitalist cheapens their wages; they compete with and underbid each other, for employed they must be on any terms. This war of the rich with the poor and the poor with one another, is

the morality which political economy inculcates. It is the only morality, save the Bible, recognized or acknowledged in free society, and is far more efficacious in directing worldly men's conduct than the Bible, for that teaches self-denial, not self-indulgence and aggrandizement. This process of underbidding each other by the poor, which universal liberty necessarily brings about, has well been compared by the author of Alton Locke to the prisoners in the Black Hole of Calcutta strangling one another. A beautiful system of ethics this, that places all mankind in antagonistic positions, and puts all society at war. What can such a war result in but the oppression and ultimate extermination of the weak? In such society the astute capitalist, who is very skilful and cunning, gets the advantage of every one with whom he competes or deals; the sensible man with moderate means gets the advantage of most with whom he has business, but the mass of the simple and poor are outwitted and cheated by everybody.

        Woman fares worst when thrown into this warfare of competition. The delicacy of her sex and her nature prevents her exercising those coarse arts which men do in the vulgar and promiscuous jostle of life, and she is reduced to the necessity of getting less than half price for her work. To the eternal disgrace of human nature,

the men who employ her value themselves on the Adam Smith principle for their virtuous and sensible conduct. "Labor is worth what it will bring; they have given the poor woman more than any one else would, or she would not have taken the work." Yet she and her children are starving, and the employer is growing rich by giving her half what her work is worth. Thus does free competition, the creature of free society, throw the whole burden of the social fabric on the poor, the weak and ignorant. They produce every thing and enjoy nothing. They are "the muzzled ox that treadeth out the straw."

        In free society none but the selfish virtues are in repute, because none other help a man in the race of competition. In such society virtue loses all her loveliness, because of her selfish aims. Good men and bad men have the same end in view: self-promotion, self-elevation. The good man is prudent, cautious, and cunning of fence; he knows well, the arts (the virtues, if you please) which enable him to advance his fortunes at the expense of those with whom he deals; he does not "cut too deep"; he does not cheat and swindle, he only makes good bargains and excellent profits. He gets more subjects by this course; everybody comes to him to be bled. He bides his time; takes advantage of the follies, the improvidence and vices of others, and makes his fortune out

of the follies and weaknesses of his fellow-men. The bad man is rash, hasty, unskilful and impolitic. He is equally selfish, but not half so prudent and cunning. Selfishness is almost the only motive of human conduct in free society, where every man is taught that it is his first duty to change and better his pecuniary situation.

        The first principles of the science of political economy inculcate separate, individual action, and are calculated to prevent that association of labor without which nothing great can be achieved; for man isolated and individualized is the most helpless of animals. We think this error of the economists proceeded from their adopting Locke's theory of the social contract. We believe no heresy in moral science has been more pregnant of mischief than this theory of Locke. It lies at the bottom of all moral speculations, and if false, must infect with falsehood all theories built on it. Some animals are by nature gregarious and associative. Of this class are men, ants and bees. An isolated man is almost as helpless and ridiculous as a bee setting up for himself. Man is born a member of society, and does not form society. Nature, as in the cases of bees and ants, has it ready formed for him. He and society are congenital. Society is the being - he one of the members of that being. He has no rights whatever, as opposed to the interests of society;

and that society may very properly make any use of him that will redound to the public good. Whatever rights he has are subordinate to the good of the whole; and he has never ceded rights to it, for he was born its slave, and had no rights to cede.

        Government is the creature of society, and may be said to derive its powers from the consent of the governed; but society does not owe its sovereign power to the separate consent, volition or agreement of its members. Like the hive, it is as much the work of nature as the individuals who compose it. Consequences; the very opposite of the doctrine of free trade, result from this doctrine of ours. It makes each society a band of brothers, working for the common good, instead of a bag of cats biting and worrying each other. The competitive system is a system of antagonism and war; ours of peace and fraternity. The first is the system of free society; the other that of slave society. The Greek, the Roman, Judaistic, Egyptian, and all ancient polities, were founded on our theory. The loftiest patrician in those days, valued himself not on selfish, cold individuality, but on being the most devoted servant of society and his country. In ancient times, the individual was considered nothing, the State every thing. And yet, under this system, the noblest individuality was evolved that the world has ever

seen. The prevalence of the doctrines of political economy has injured Southern character, for in the South those doctrines most prevail. Wealthy men, who are patterns of virtue in the discharge of their domestic duties, value themselves on never intermeddling in public matters. They forget that property is a mere creature of law and society, and are willing to make no return for that property to the public, which by its laws gave it to them, and which guard and protect them in its possession.

        All great enterprises owe their success to association of capital and labor. The North is indebted for its great wealth and prosperity to the readiness with which it forms associations for all industrial and commercial purposes. The success of Southern farming is a striking instance of the value of the association of capital and laborers, and ought to suggest to the South the necessity of it for other purposes.

        The dissociation of labor and disintegration of society, which liberty and free competition occasion, is especially injurious to the poorer class; for besides the labor necessary to support the family, the poor man is burdened with the care of finding a home, and procuring employment, and attending to all domestic wants and concerns. Slavery relieves our slaves of these cares altogether, and slavery is a form, and the very best

form, of socialism. In fact, the ordinary wages of common labor are insufficient to keep up separate domestic establishments for each of the poor, and association or starvation is in many cases inevitable. In free society, as well in Europe as in America, this is the accepted theory, and various schemes have been resorted to, all without success, to cure the evil. The association of labor properly carried out under a common head or ruler, would render labor more efficient, relieve the laborer of many of the cares of household affairs, and protect and support him in sickness and old age, besides preventing the too great reduction of wages by redundancy of labor and free competition. Slavery attains all these results. What else will?

        We find in the days of Sir Matthew Hale, a very singular pamphlet attributed to him. It was an attempt to prove that two healthy laborers, marrying and having in the usual time four children, could not at ordinary labor, and with ordinary wages, support their family. The nursing, washing, cooking and making clothes, would fully occupy the wife. The husband, with the chances of sickness and uncertainty of employment, would have to support four. Such is the usual and normal condition of free laborers. With six children, the oldest say twelve years of age, their condition would be worse. Or should the husband

die, the family that remained would be still worse off. There are large numbers of aged and infirm male and female laborers; so that as a class, it is obvious, we think, that under ordinary circumstances, in old countries, they are incapable of procuring a decent and comfortable support. The wages of the poor diminish as their wants and families increase, for the care and labor of attending to the family leaves them fewer hours for profitable work. With negro slaves, their wages invariably increase with their wants. The master increases the provision for the family as the family increases in number and helplessness. It is a beautiful example of communism, where each one receives not according to his labor, but according to his wants.

        A maxim well calculated not only to retard the progress of civilization, but to occasion its retrogression, has grown out of the science of political economy. "The world is too much governed," has become quite an axiom with many politicians. Now the need of law and government is just in proportion to man's wealth and enlightenment. Barbarians and savages need and will submit to but few and simple laws, and little of government. The love of personal liberty and freedom from all restraint, are distinguishing traits of wild men and wild beasts. Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors loved personal liberty because they were barbarians, but

they did not love it half so much as North American Indians or Bengal tigers, because they were not half so savage. As civilization advances, liberty recedes: and it is fortunate for man that he loses his love of liberty just as fast as he becomes more moral and intellectual. The wealthy, virtuous and religious citizens of large towns enjoy less of liberty than any other persons whatever, and yet they are the most useful and rationally happy of all mankind. The best governed countries, and those which have prospered most, have always been distinguished for the number and stringency of their laws. Good men obey superior authority, the laws of God, of morality, and of their country; bad men love liberty and violate them. It would be difficult very often for the most ingenious casuist to distinguish between sin and liberty; for virtue consists in the performance of duty, and the obedience to that law or power that imposes duty, whilst sin is but the violation of duty and disobedience to such law and power. It is remarkable, in this connection, that sin began by the desire for liberty and the attempt to attain it in the person of Satan and his fallen angels. The world wants good government and a plenty of it - not liberty. It is deceptive in us to boast of our Democracy, to assert the capacity of the people for self-government, and then refuse to them its exercise. In

New England, and in all our large cities, where the people govern most, they are governed best. If government be not too much centralized, there is little danger of too much government. The danger and evil with us is of too little. Carlyle says of our institutions, that they are "anarchy plus a street constable." We ought not to be bandaged up too closely in our infancy, it might prevent growth and development; but the time is coming when we shall need more of government, if we would secure the permanency of our institutions.

        All men concur in the opinion that some government is necessary. Even the political economist would punish murder, theft, robbery, gross swindling, &c. but they encourage men to compete with and slowly undermine and destroy one another by means quite as effective as those they forbid. We have heard a distinguished member of this school object to negro slavery, because the protection it afforded to an inferior race would perpetuate that race, which, if left free to compete with the whites, must be starved out in a few generations. Members of Congress, of the Young American party, boast that the Anglo-Saxon race is manifestly destined to eat out all other races, as the wire-grass destroys and takes the place of other grasses. Nay, they allege this competitive process is going on throughout all

nature; the weak are everywhere devouring the strong; the hardier plants and animals destroying the weaker, and the superior races of man exterminating the inferior. They would challenge our admiration for this war of nature, by which they say Providence is perfecting its own work - getting rid of what is weak and indifferent, and preserving only what is strong and hardy. We see the war, but not the improvement. This competitive, destructive system has been going on from the earliest records of history; and yet the plants, the animals, and the men of to-day are not superior to those of four thousand years ago. To restrict this destructive, competitive propensity, man was endowed with reason, and enabled to pass laws to protect the weak against the strong. To encourage it, is to encourage the strong to oppress the weak, and to violate the primary object of an government. It is strange it should have entered the head of any philosopher to set the weak, who are the majority of mankind, to competing, contending and fighting with the strong, in order to improve their condition.

        Hobbes maintains that "a state of nature is a state of war." This is untrue of a state of nature, because men are naturally associative; but it is true of a civilized state of universal liberty, and free competition, such as Hobbes saw around

him, and which no doubt suggested his theory. The wants of man and his history alike prove that slavery has always been part of his social organization. A less degree of subjection is inadequate for the government and protection of great numbers of human beings.

        An intelligent English writer, describing society as he saw it, uses this language:

        "There is no disguising from the cool eye of philosophy, that all living creatures exist in a state of natural warfare; and that man (in hostility with all) is at enmity also with his own species; man is the natural enemy of man; and society, unable to change his nature, succeeds but in establishing a hollow truce by which fraud is substituted for violence."

        Such is free society, fairly portrayed; such are the infidel doctrines of political economy, when candidly avowed. Slavery and Christianity bring about a lasting peace, not "a hollow truce." But we mount a step higher. We deny that there is a society in free countries. They who act each for himself, who are hostile, antagonistic and competitive, are not social and do not constitute a society. We use the term free society, for want of a better; but, like the term free government, it is an absurdity: those who are governed are not free - those who are free are not social.

CHAPTER II.

FAILURE OF FREE SOCIETY AND RISE OF SOCIALISM.

liberty concede that the laboring class enjoy more material comfort, are better fed, clothed and housed, as slaves, than as freemen. The statistics of crime demonstrate that the moral superiority of the slave over the free laborer is still greater than his superiority in animal well-being. There never can be among slaves a class so degraded as is found about the wharves and suburbs of cities. The master requires and enforces ordinary morality and industry. We very much fear, if it were possible to indite a faithful comparison of the conduct and comfort of our free negroes with that of the runaway Anglo-Saxon serfs, that it would be found that the negroes have fared better and committed much less crime than the whites. But those days, the 14th and 15th centuries, were the halcyon days of vagabond liberty. The few that had escaped from bondage found a wide field and plenty of subjects for the practice of theft and mendicity. There was no law and no police adequate to restrain them, for until then their masters had kept them in order better than laws ever can. But those glorious old times have long since passed. A bloody code, a standing army and efficient police keep them quiet enough now. Their numbers have multiplied a hundred fold, but their poverty has increased faster than their numbers. Instead of stealing and begging, and

living idly in the open air, they work fourteen hours a day, cooped up in close rooms, with foul air, foul water, and insufficient and filthy food, and often sleep at night crowded in cellars or in garrets, without regard to sex.

        In proceeding to prove that this is a correct account of the effects in England of liberating the laboring class, we are at much difficulty how to select from the mass of testimony that at every turn presents itself to us. We are not aware that any one disputes the fact that crime and pauperism throughout Western Europe increased pari passu with liberty, equality and free competition. We know of but a single respectable authority that disputes the fact that this increase is directly attributable to free competition or liberty. Even the Edinburgh Review, hitherto the great champion of political economy and free competition, has been silent on the subject for several years. With strange inconsistency, the very men who assert that universal liberty has, and must ever, from the nature of things, increase crime, mendicity and pauperism among the laboring class, maintain that slavery degrades this very class whom it preserves from poverty and crime. The elevation of the scaffold is the only moral or physical elevation that they can point to which distinguishes the condition of the free laborer from his servile ancestor. The peasantry of England,

in the days of Presley, Agincourt and Shrewsbury, when feudalism prevailed, were generally brave, virtuous, and in the enjoyment of a high degree of physical comfort - at least, that comfort differed very little from that of their lords and masters. This same peasantry, when Charles Edward with three thousand Highlanders invaded England, had become freemen and cowards. Starving Frenchmen will at least fight, but starving Chartists only bluster. How slavery could degrade men lower than universal liberty has done, it is hard to conceive; how it did and would again preserve them from such degradation, is well explained by those who are loudest in its abuse. A consciousness of security, a full comprehension of his position, and a confidence in that position, and the absence of all corroding cares and anxieties, makes the slave easy and self-assured in his address, cheerful, happy and contented, free from jealousy, malignity, and envy, and at peace with all around him. His attachment to his master begets the sentiment of loyalty, than which none more purifies and elevates human nature. This theory of the moral influences of slavery is suggested and in part borrowed from Alexandre Dumas' "French Milliner." He, descended from a negro slave, and we may presume prejudiced against slavery, speaks in glowing terms of its happy influence on the lives and

manners of the Russian serfs. He draws a contrast between their cheerfulness and the wretchedness of the French laboring class, and attributes solely to the feeling of security which slavery induces, their enviable cheerfulness.

        The free laborer rarely has a house and home of his own; he is insecure of employment; sickness may overtake him at any time and deprive him of the means of support; old age is certain to overtake him, if he lives, and generally finds him without the means of subsistence; his family is probably increasing in numbers, and is helpless and burdensome to him. In all this there is little to incite to virtue, much to tempt to crime, nothing to afford happiness, but quite enough to inflict misery. Man must be more than human, to acquire a pure and a high morality under such circumstances.

        In free society the sentiments, principles; feelings and affections of high and low, rich and poor, are equally blunted and debased by the continual war of competition. It begets rivalries, jealousies and hatreds on all hands. The poor can neither love nor respect the rich, who, instead of aiding and protecting them, are endeavoring to cheapen their labor and take away their means of subsistence. The rich can hardly respect themselves, when they reflect that wealth is the result of avarice, caution, circumspection

and hard dealing. These are the virtues which free society in its regular operation brings forth. Its moral influence is therefore no better on the rich than on the poor. The number of laborers being excessive in all old countries, they are continually struggling with, scandalizing and underbidding each other, to get places and employment. Every circumstance in the poor man's situation in free society is one of harassing care, of grievous temptation, and of excitement to anger, envy, jealousy and malignity. That so many of the poor should nevertheless be good and pure, kind, happy and high-minded, is proof enough that the poor class is not the worst class in society. But the rich have their temptations, too. Capital gives them the power to oppress; selfishness offers the inducement, and political economy, the moral guide of the day, would justify the oppression. Yet there are thousands of noble and generous and disinterested men in free society, who employ their wealth to relieve, and not to oppress the poor. Still these are exceptions to the general rule. The effect of such society is to encourage the oppression of the poor.

        The ink was hardly dry with which Adam Smith wrote his Wealth of Nations, lauding the benign influences of free society, ere the hunger and want and nakedness of that society engendered a revolutionary explosion that shook the world to

its centre. The starving artisans and laborers, and fish-women and needle-women of Paris, were the authors of the first French revolution, and that revolution was everywhere welcomed, and spread from nation to nation like fire in the prairies. The French armies met with but a formal opposition, until they reached Russia. There, men had homes and houses and a country to fight for. The serfs of Russia, the undisciplined Cossacks, fought for lares and penates, their homes, their country, and their God, and annihilated an army more numerous than that of Xerxes, and braver and better appointed than the tenth legion of Caesar. What should Western European poor men fight for? All the world was the same to them. They had been set free to starve, without a place to rest their dying heads or to inter their dead bodies. Any change they thought would be for the better, and hailed Buonaparte as a deliverer. But the nature of the evil was not understood; there were some remnants of feudalism, some vigor in the Catholic church; these Buonaparte swept away, and left the poor without a stay or a hope. Buonaparte is conquered and banished, universal peace restored; commerce, mechanic arts, manufactures and agriculture revive and flourish; invention is stimulated, industry urged on to its utmost exertion. Never seemed the world so prosperous, so happy, so

progressive. But only seemed! Those awful statistics unfold the sad tale that misery and crime and poverty are on the increase still. The prisons are filled, the poor houses and the penal colonies supplied too fast, and the gallows ever pendant with its subject. In 1830, Paris starves again, builds barricades, continues hungry, and hesitates what next to do. Finally sets up a new king, no better than the one she has expelled. Revolution follows revolution with electric speed throughout great part of Western Europe. Kings are deposed, governments changed; soon new kings put in their places, and things subside - not quietly - into the status quo ante bellum. All this, while millions of the poor are fleeing from Europe as men fly from an infected plague spot, to seek their fortunes in other climes and regions. Another eighteen years of hunger, of crime, of riots, strikes, and trades unions, passes over free society. In 1848 the drama of 1830 is almost literally re-enacted. Again Paris starves, builds barricades, and expels her king. Again Western Europe follows her example. By this time, however, men had discovered that political changes would not cure the diseases of society. The poor must have bread; government must furnish it. Liberty without bread was not worth fighting for. A Republic is set up in Paris that promises employment and good wages

to every body. The experiment is tried and fails in a week. No employment, except transplanting trees and levelling mounds, could be found, and the treasury breaks. After struggling and blundering and staggering on through various changes, Louis Napoleon is made Emperor. He is a socialist, and socialism is the new fashionable name of slavery. He understands the disease of society, and has nerve enough for any surgical operation that may be required to cure it. His first step in socialism was to take the money of the rich to buy wheat for all. The measure was well-timed, necessary and just. He is now building houses on the social plan for working men, and his Queen is providing nurseries and nurses for the children of the working women, just as we Southerners do for our negro women and children. It is a great economy. Fourier suggested it long after Southerners had practiced it. During these times there was a little episode in Ireland - Ireland, the freest country in the world, where law is violated every day, mocked at and derided, whence the rich and the noble have emigrated, where all are poor, all equal, and all idle. A few thousands only had usually starved annually; but the potatoe crop failed; they had no feudal lords to buy other food for them, and three hundred thousand starved in a single season. No slave or

serf ever did starve, unless he were a runaway. Irishmen, although they love liberty to distraction, have lost their taste for starving. They are coming en masse to America, and in a few years, at the present rate of emigration, will leave the island without inhabitants. The great and increasing emigration from free society in Europe can only be accounted for on the ground that they believe their social system so rotten that no mere political change can help them - for a political revolution can be had on twenty-four hours' notice.

        The Chartists and Radicals of England would in some way subvert and re-construct society. They complain of free competition as a crying evil, and may be classed with the Socialists. The high conservative party called Young England vainly endeavors, by preaching fine sentiments, to produce that good feeling between the rich and the poor, the weak and the powerful, which slavery alone can bring about. Liberty places those classes in positions of antagonism and war. Slavery identifies the interests of rich and poor, master and slave, and begets domestic affection on the one side, and loyalty and respect on the other. Young England sees clearly enough the character of the disease, but is not bold enough to propose an adequate remedy. The poor themselves are all practical Socialists, and in some degree pro-slavery

men. They unite in strikes and trades unions, and thus exchange a part of their liberties in order to secure high and uniform wages. The exchange is a prudent and sensible one; but they who have bartered off liberty, are fast verging towards slavery. Slavery to an association is not always better than slavery to a single master. The professed object is to avoid ruinous underbidding and competition with one another; but this competition can never cease whilst liberty lasts. Those who wish to be free must take liberty with this inseparable burden. Odd-Fellows’ societies, temperance societies, and all other societies that provide for sick and unfortunate members, are instances of Socialism. The muse in England for many years has been busy in composing dissonant laborer songs, bewailing the hardships, penury and sufferings of the poor, and indignantly rebuking the cruelty and injustice of their hard-hearted and close-fisted employers.

        Dickens and Bulwer denounce the frame-work of society quite as loudly as Carlyle and Newman; the two latter of whom propose slavery as a remedy for existing evils. A large portion of the clergy are professed Socialists, and there is scarcely a literary man in England who is not ready to propose radical and organic changes in her social system. Germany is full of Communists; social discontent is universal, and her people are leaving

en masse for America - hopeless of any amelioration at home for the future. Strange to tell, in the free States of America too, Socialism and every other heresy that can be invoked to make war on existing institutions, prevail to an alarming extent. Even according to our own theory of the necessity of slavery, we should not suppose that that necessity would be so soon felt in a new and sparsely-settled country, where the supply of labor does not exceed the demand. But it is probable the constant arrival of emigrants makes the situation of the laborer at the North as precarious as in Europe, and produces a desire for some change that shall secure him employment and support at all times. Slavery alone can effect that change; and towards slavery the North and all Western Europe are unconsciously marching. The master evil they all complain of is free competition - which is another name for liberty. Let them remove that evil, and they will find themselves slaves, with all the advantages and disadvantages of slavery. They will have attained association of labor, for slavery produces association of labor, and is one of the ends all Communists and Socialists desire. A well-conducted farm in the South is a model of associated labor that Fourier might envy. One old woman nurses all the children whilst the mothers are at work; another waits on the sick, in a house set aside

for them. Another washes and cooks, and a fourth makes and mends the clothing. It is a great economy of labor, and is a good idea of the Socialists. Slavery protects the infants, the aged and the sick; nay, takes far better care of them than of the healthy, the middle-aged and the strong. They are part of the family, and self-interest and domestic affection combine to shelter, shield and foster them. A man loves not only his horses and his cattle, which are useful to him, but he loves his dog, which is of no use. He loves them because they are his. What a wise and beneficent provision of Heaven, that makes the selfishness of man's nature a protecting aegis to shield and defend wife and children, slaves and even dumb animals. The Socialists propose to reach this result too, but they never can if they refuse to march in the only road Providence has pointed out. Who will check, govern and control their superintending authority? Who prevent his abuse of power? Who can make him kind, tender and affectionate, to the poor, aged, helpless, sick and unfortunate? Qui custodiat custodes? Nature establishes the only safe and reliable checks and balances in government. Alton Locke describes an English farm, where the cattle, the horses and the sheep are fat, plentifully fed and warmly housed; the game in the preserves and the fish in the pond carefully provided for; and

two freezing, shivering, starving, half-clad boys, who have to work on the Sabbath, are the slaves to these animals, and are vainly endeavoring to prepare their food. Now it must have occurred to the author that if the boys had belonged to the owner of the farm, they too would have been well-treated, happy and contented. This farm is but a miniature of all England; every animal is well-treated and provided for, except the laboring man. He is the slave of the brutes, the slave of society, produces everything and enjoys nothing. Make him the slave of one man, instead of the slave of society, and he would be far better off. None but lawyers and historians are aware how much of truth, justice and good sense, there is in the notions of the Communists, as to the community of property. Laying no stress on the too abstract proposition that Providence gave the world not to one man, or set of men, but to all mankind, it is a fact that all governments, in civilized countries, recognize the obligation to support the poor, and thus, in some degree, make all property a common possession. The poor laws and poor houses of England are founded on communistic principles. Each parish is compelled to support its own poor. In Ireland, this obligation weighs so heavily as in many instances to make farms valueless; the poor rates exceeding the rents. But it is domestic slavery alone that can

establish a safe, efficient and humane community of property. It did so in ancient times, it did so in feudal times, and does so now, in Eastern Europe, Asia and America. Slaves never die of hunger; seldom suffer want. Hence Chinese sell themselves when they can do no better. A Southern farm is a sort of joint stock concern, or social phalastery, in which the master furnishes the capital and skill, and the slaves the labor, and divide the profits, not according to each one's in-put, but according to each one’s wants and necessities.

        Socialism proposes to do away with free competition; to afford protection and support at all times to the laboring class; to bring about, at least, a qualified community of property, and to associate labor. All these purposes, slavery fully and perfectly attains.

        To prove the evil effects, moral, social and economic, of the emancipation of feudal slaves or villiens , and how those evil effects gave birth to Socialism, we quote first from the Pictorial History of England:

        "To the period (15th century,) immediately preceding the present, belongs the origin of English pauperism, as well as of the legislation on the subject of the poor. So long as the system of villienage was maintained in its integrity, there could be no paupers in the land; that is to say, no persons left destitute of the means of subsistence,

except beggary or public alms. The principle of that institution was, that every individual who had nothing else, had at least a right of food and shelter from the landed proprietor whose bondsman he was. The master was not more entitled to the services of his villien, than the villien was to the maintenance of himself and his family, at the expense of his master. This has of absolute necessity been the law in every country in which slavery has existed. * * * * But as soon as the original slavery of the English laboring population begun to be exchanged for freedom, and villienage gradually, and at last generally passed away in the manner stated in the last book, the working man, now his own master, was of course left in all circumstances to his own resources; and when either want of employment, or sickness, or the helplessness of old age came upon him, if he had not saved something from his former earnings, and had no one to take care of him from motives of affection or compassion, his condition was as unprovided for as that of the fowls of the heavens. But men will not starve, whilst they can either beg or steal; hence, the first appearance that the destitute poor, as a class of the community, make in our annals, is in the character of thieves and mendicants, sometimes enforcing their demands by threats or violence." - Vol. 2d, pages 262, 263.

        Such is the description of free society at its birth, by authors who hate and denounce slavery. We will proceed to prove from like authority, that the number of mendicants and thieves has increased with accelerating speed from that day to this.

        We find in Hume's History of England, treating of the discontents of the people in the reign of Edward VI., the following language:

        "There is no abuse in civil society so great as not to be attended with a variety of beneficial consequences; and in the beginnings of reformation, the loss of these advantages is always felt very sensibly, while the benefit resulting from the change is the slow effect of time, and is seldom perceived by the bulk of the nation. Scarce any institution can be imagined less favorable in the main to the interests of mankind, than that of monks and friars; yet was it followed by many good effects, which having ceased by the suppression of the monasteries, were much regretted by the people of England. The monks always residing in their convents in the centre of their estates, spent their money in the provinces, and among their tenants, afforded a ready market for commodities, and were a sure resource to the poor and indigent; and though their hospitality and charity gave too much encouragement to idleness, and prevented the increase of public riches, yet

did it provide to many a relief from the extreme pressure of want and necessity."

        In the Pictorial History of England, under the head of the Condition of the People, about the 16th and 17th centuries, we find crime and pauperism still on the increase, and hundreds of essays and books written and many acts of Parliament passed on this perplexing and growing evil in free society. But it was after Napoleon had made a dead level of Western European society, a sort of "tabula raza," by destroying the remnants of feudalism and crippling and cramping the Catholic Church, that liberty and free competition were first given free scope and elbow-room. Not till then had the doctrines, that "might makes right" and "every man for himself, and devil take the hindmost," been brought into full play. The natural consequence was, that the strong conquered and devoured the weak much faster than they had ever done before. The world of the political economists, the rich, the astute, the avaricious, the prudent, the circumspect and hard-hearted, started forward with railroad speed and railroad recklessness. The world of the Socialists, (vastly increased in numbers,) the poor, the weak, ignorant, generous and improvident, ran backwards quite as fast as the other world went forward. Almost every middle-aged man who can read a newspaper, is aware, that whilst

the aggregate wealth of civilized mankind has increased more rapidly since the fall of Napoleon than it ever did before, and whilst the discoveries and inventions in physical science have rapidly lessened the amount of labor necessary to procure human subsistence and comfort, yet these advantages have been monopolized by the few, and the laboring millions are in worse condition (in free society) than they ever were before. On this subject we shall quote from two able articles in Blackwood, not because our positions need proof, but because these quotations will throw much light on the character of the disease under which free society is suffering, and show that protection of some kind is imperiously demanded to shield the masses from the grinding oppression of universal liberty, free competition and laissez-faire, and to show that it is the carrying into practical operation the theories of the political economists, or free trade men, that has occasioned the unexampled progress and prosperity of the few who are strong, and the appalling and increasing crime and destitution of the many, who are weak. Further, these quotations will sustain and illustrate our doctrine that the political economists have taken partial views of society, and have mistaken the good luck and success of their friends for the general condition and fortune of mankind. Blackwood seems to contemplate protection against foreign

competition as an adequate remedy. We leave it to the intelligent reader to say, whether protection against social and domestic competition is not quite as necessary - and nothing but slavery can afford this latter protection.

        In a review of Alton Locke in Blackwood, Nov. No. 1850, the following passages will be found:

        "No man with a human heart in his bosom, unless that heart is utterly indurated and depraved by the influence of mammon, can be indifferent to the fate of the working classes. Even if he were not urged to consider the awful social questions which daily demand our attention in this perplexing and bewildered age, by the impulses of humanity or by the call of Christian duty, the lower motive of interest alone should incline him to serious reflection on a subject which involves the well-being, both temporal and eternal, of thousands of his fellow-beings, and possibly the permanence of order and tranquility in this realm of Great Britain. Our civil history during the last thirty years of peace, resembles nothing which the world has yet seen or which can be found in the records of civilization. The progress which has been made in the mechanical sciences is of itself almost equivalent to a revolution. The whole face of society has been altered; old employments have become obsolete, old customs have been altered or remodelled, and old institutions have

undergone innovation. The modern citizen thinks and acts differently from his fathers. What to them was object of reverence, is to him subject of ridicule; what they were accustomed to prize and honor, he regards with undisguised contempt. All this we call improvement, taking no heed the while whether such improvement has fulfilled the primary condition of contributing to and increasing the welfare and prosperity of the people. Statistical books are written to prove how enormously we have increased in wealth, and yet, side by side with Mr. Porter's bulky tome, you will find pamphlets containing ample and distinct evidence that hundreds of thousands of our industrious fellow-countrymen are at this moment famishing for lack of employment, or compelled to sell their labor for such wretched compensation, that the pauper's dole is by many regarded with absolute envy. Dives and Lazarus elbow one another in the street, and our political economists select Dives as the sole type of the nation. Sanitary commissioners are appointed to whiten the outside of the sepulchre; and during the operation their stomachs are made sick by the taint of the rottenness within. The reform of Parliament is, comparatively speaking, a matter of yesterday; and yet the operatives are petitioning for the charter!

        These are stern realities, grave facts, which it is impossible to gainsay. What may be the result

of them, unless some adequate remedy can be provided, it is impossible with certainty to predict; but unless we are prepared to deny the doctrine of that retribution which has been directly revealed to us from above, and of which the history of neighboring states affords us so many striking examples, we can hardly expect to remain unpunished for what is truly a national crime. The offense, indeed, according to all the elements of human calculation, is likely to bring its own punishment. It cannot be that society can exist in tranquility, or order be permanently maintained, so long as a large portion of the working classes, of the hard-handed men whose industry makes capital move and multiply itself, are exposed to the operation of a system that makes their position less tolerable than that of Egyptian bondsmen. To work is not only a duty, but a privilege; but to work against hope, to toil under the absolute pressure of despair, is the most miserable lot that the imagination can possibly conceive. It is, in fact, a virtual abrogation of that freedom which every Briton is taught to consider his birthright, but which now, however well it may sound as an abstract term, is practically, in the case of thousands, placed utterly beyond their reach.

        We shall not probably be suspected of any intention to inculcate radical doctrines. We have

no sympathy, but the reverse, with the quacks, visionaries and agitators, who make a livelihood by preaching disaffection in our towns and cities and who are the worst enemies of the people whose cause they pretend to advocate. We detest the selfish views of the Manchester school of politicians, and we loathe that hypocrisy which, under the pretext of reforming, would destroy the institutions of the country. But, if it be true, as we believe it to be, that the working and producing classes of the community are suffering unexampled hardship, and that not of a temporary and exceptional kind, but from the operation of some vicious and baneful element that has crept into our social system, it then becomes our duty to attempt to discover the actual nature of the evil; and, having discovered that, to consider seriously what cure it is possible to apply." * * * "Here is a question urgently presenting itself to the consideration of all thinking men; a question which concerns the welfare of hundreds of thousands; a question which has been evaded by statesmen so long as they dared to do so with impunity; but which now can be no longer evaded: that question being, whether any possible means can be found for ameliorating and improving the condition of the working classes of Great Britain, by rescuing them from the cruel effects of that competition which makes each man

the enemy of his fellow; which is annually driving from our shores crowds of our best and most industrious artisans; which consigns women from absolute indigence to infamy; dries up the most sacred springs of affection in the heart; crams the jail and the poor-house; and is eating like a fatal canker into the very heart-blood of society." This subject was deemed by Blackwood so important, that it was resumed in a subsequent number of that review, "The Dangers of the Country," March number, 1851. We will not fatigue the reader's attention with extracts from that article, which is a most able and interesting one; but will merely state that, after giving tedious and careful statistics, showing the rapid and unexampled increase of crime and pauperism in Great Britain since 1819, a period in which the prosperity of the upper classes was as remarkable as the continually increasing debasement and misery of the lower, the Reviewer concludes with these emphatic words: "But this we do say, and with these words we nail our colors to the mast, PROTECTION MUST BE RESTORED, OR THE BRITISH EMPIRE WILE BE DISSOLVED." Now the evil complained of is free competition, and nothing short of some modification of slavery can give protection against free competition. To leave no room for cavil or doubt as to the truth of our positions, that pauperism commenced and crime

was increased with the birth of the liberty of the laboring class, and that each extension of liberty has immediately occasioned an accelerated increase of poverty and crime, we wish to adduce authorities, not only of the highest character, but representing all parties and shades of opinion. We now quote from the April number, 1854, of the Westminster Review on "The Results of the Census." After treating of the breaking up of the feudal system and dissolution of the Catholic church, the writer thus proceeds "These interests having gone down and another class having arisen, is there any other to be considered? Yes an enormous one - an appalling one - the pauper interest. Long before the dissolution of the monasteries, the pauperism of the country had become an almost unmanageable evil. It began with the abolition of serfage; and the monasteries absorbed as much as they could of an existing evil, increasing it all the while. From the fourteenth century there had been laws to restrain vagrancy; and in the sixteenth it had increased 'to the marvellous disturbance of the common weal of this realm.' Beggars went about,'valiant and sturdy,' in great 'routs and companies.' The vagrants were to be put in prison, branded and whipped; the clergy were to press all good citizens to give alms; and all who were able must find employment for those who could work. Then came the

compulsory tax: and then the celebrated 43d Elizabeth; and all apparently in vain. The lower class had not risen, generally speaking, with the middle; and there was as wide an interval between that middle class and the pauper banditti of the realm, as there once was between the landed class and the serfs." Pauper banditti! And this is what two hundred years of liberty makes of white laborers. And now four hundred years have passed over, and their condition is getting daily worse; they are quitting their homes - no, not homes, for they have none - but flying from the land that has persecuted them to every wild and desert corner of the earth.

        The cotemporaneous appearance of Alton Locke and a vast number of pamphlets and essays on the subject of the sufferings and crimes of the laboring class in Great Britain, forms a most interesting epoch in the history of social science. No one who pays the least attention to the subject, will doubt that the doctrines and philosophy of socialism or communism, which just then became rife in England, owed their birth to the increased and increasing sufferings of the poor, which that philosophy proposes to remove. The Edinburgh Review, in its January number, 1851, discourses as follows: "As long as socialism was confined to the turbulent, the wild and the disreputable, and was associated with tenets which made it

disgusting and disreputable, perhaps the wisest plan was to pass it over in silence, and suffer it to die of its own inherent weakness. But now, when it has appeared in a soberer guise and purified from much of its evil intermixtures; when it has shown itself an actual and energetic reality in France; when it has spread among the intelligent portions of the working classes in our own country more extensively than is commonly believed; when it raises its head under various modifications, and often as it were unconsciously, in the disquisitions which issue from the periodical press; when a weekly journal, conducted with great ability as to every thing but logic, is devoted to its propagation; and when clergymen of high literary reputation give in their scarcely qualified adherence, and are actively engaged in reducing to practice their own peculiar modification of the theory, it would be no longer kindly or decorous to ignore a subject which is so deeply interesting to thousands of our countrymen." In speaking of the doctrines of the socialists, the writer goes on to say: "The position they take is this: Society is altogether out of joint. Its anomalies, its disfigured aspect, its glaring inequalities, the sufferings of the most numerous portions of it, are monstrous, indefensible, and yearly increasing. Mere palliations, mere sham improvements, mere gradual ameliorations will not meet

its wants; it must be remodelled, not merely furbished up. Political economy has hitherto had it all its own way; and the shocking condition into which it has brought us, shews that its principles must be strangely inadequate or unsound. The miseries of the great mass of the people, the inability to find work, or to obtain in return for such work as can be performed in reasonable time and by ordinary strength a sufficiency of the comforts and necessaries of life, may all be traced to one source - competition instead of combination. The antagonistic and regenerative principle which must be introduced, is association." No association, no efficient combination of labor can be effected till men give up their liberty of action and subject themselves to a common despotic head or ruler. This is slavery, and towards this socialism is moving. The above quotation and the succeeding one go to prove the positions with which we set out: that free trade or political economy is the science of free society, and socialism the science of slavery. The writer from whom we are quoting sees and thus exposes the tendency of socialism to slavery: "There is the usual jumble between the fourteenth century and the nineteenth; the desire to recall the time when the poor were at once the serfs and the proteges of the rich, and to amalgamate it with the days of chartism, when the poor assert their equality

and insist upon their freedom. It is not thus that irritation can be allayed or miseries removed or wrongs redressed. The working classes and their advocates must decide on which of the two positions they will take their stand: whether they will be cared for as dependents and inferiors, or whether, by wisdom, self-control, frugality and toil, they will fight their independent way to dignity and well-being; whether they will step back to a stationary and degraded past, or strive onward to the assertion of their free humanity? But it is not given to them, any more than to other classes, to combine inconsistent advantages; they cannot unite the safety of being in leading strings, with the liberty of being without them; the right of acting for themselves, with the right to be saved from the consequences of their actions; they must not whine because the higher classes do not aid them, and refuse to let these classes direct them; they must not insist on the duty of government to provide for them, and deny the authority of government to control them; they must not denounce laissez-faire, and denounce a paternal despotism likewise." The greatest of all communists, if communist he be, Proudhon, has also seen and exposed this tendency of socialism to slavery. He is a thorough-going enemy of modern free society; calls property a thief; and would, he says, establish anarchy in place of government! But

we have not been able to understand his system, if any he has.

        The North British Review stands probably as high for its ability, sound political views and literary integrity, as any other periodical whatever. We will cite copiously from its article on "Literature on the Labor Question," February No. 1851, not merely for the weight of its authority and the force of its arguments, but chiefly because the writer of that article sums up with some fulness and great ability the proofs of the failure of society as now constituted in Western Europe, and of the almost universal abandonment of political economy, the philosophy of that society:

        "Servants of this class, and constituting by far the most numerous portion of every community, are the prolétaires, or speaking more restrictedly, the working men, who earn to-day's bread by to-day's labor. They are the veritable descendants of those who in ancient times were the slaves; with but few differences their social position is the same. Despite saving banks, temperance societies, and institutions for mutual improvement, the characteristics of this class, like that of the literary class, is, and probably ever will be, pecuniary insouciance. From week to week, these thousands live, now in work and now out of work, as careless of to-morrow as if Benjamin Franklin had never lived, entering at one end of the journey

of existence and issuing at the other, without ever having at any one moment accumulated five superfluous shillings."

        A beautiful commentary on the dignity of labor.

        As to the prevalence of discontent with free society, and of socialistic and revolutionary doctrines in France, the writer employs the follow language:

        "One cannot now take up a French bookseller’s list of advertisements, without seeing the titles of publications of all kinds and sizes devoted to the elucidation of social questions. 'L'Organization du Travail;' 'Destinie Sociale;''Etudes sur la principales causes de la Misere;''De la condition physique and morale des jeune Ouvriens.' Such are some of the titles of a class of French books sufficient already to form a library. The thing, in fact, has become a profession in France. Men of all kinds and of all capacities - men who do not care one farthing about the condition of the people or about the condition of any body except themselves, as well as men of real goodness and philanthropy, now write books full of statistics about the working classes, and of plans for diminishing the amount of social evil. And so too in this country. The 'Condition of England Question' has become the target at which every shallow witling must aim his shaft. All literature seems to be flowing towards this channel, so that there seems

to be a likelihood that we shall soon have no literature at all but a literature of social reference."

        Whilst all this hubbub and confusion is going on in France and England, occasioned by the intensest suffering of the free laborers, we of the South and of all slaveholding countries, have been "calm as a summer's evening," quite unconscious of the storm brewing around us. Yet those people who confess that their situation is desperate, insist that we shall imitate their institutions, starve our laborers, multiply crime, riots and pauperism, in order, we suppose, to try the experiment of Mormonism, Socialism or Communism. Try it first, yourselves!

        The following passage - and we have quoted a similar one from Blackwood - is a distinct assertion of the complete failure of free society. It is the admission of witnesses of the highest character, corroborated by the testimony of all classes of society - for the poor, by their strikes, trade unions, temperance societies, odd-fellow societies, and insurance societies, speak as eloquently on this subject as the rich and the learned.

        "'Alton Locke' is, upon the whole, as powerful a literary expression as exists of the general conviction, shared by all classes alike, that the country has arrived at a condition when something extraordinary, whatever it is, must be decided on and done, if society is to be saved in Great Britain.

As such, therefore, it is a book that should be welcome to all parties."

        Now listen to the conclusion, and see whether the practical remedy proposed be not SLAVERY. We believe there is not an intelligent reformist in the world who does not see the necessity of slavery - who does not advocate its re-institution in all save the name. Every one of them concurs in deprecating free competition, and in the wish and purpose to destroy it. To destroy it is to destroy Liberty, and where liberty is destroyed, slavery is established.

        "At what conclusion have we arrived? We have pointed out as one of the most remarkable signs of the times, the appearance of a literature of social reference, originating in and then farther promoting a repprochement between the two extremes of society, men of letters and the working classes. We have examined, and to some extent analyzed, the two most conspicuous examples that have been recently furnished in this country, of this new direction and intention of literature. And what has been the result? The result has been, that in both cases, we have found ourselves conducted by the writers in question to one point: the pronunciation of the terrible phrase, 'Organization of Labor,' and the contemplation of a possible exodus, at no very distant period, out of the Egypt of our present system, of competition

and laissez-faire into a comparative Canaan of some kind of co-operative socialism. Such is the fact: startling it may be, but deserving to be fairly stated and apprehended. Right or wrong, we believe this to be a true version and fair history of our current social literature. We have elicited from an examination of but two examples; but we believe the most extensive examination would not invalidate it. Collect all the books, pamphlets and papers that constitute our literature of social reference, or assemble all our men of letters, who have contributed to that literature, so as to learn their private aspirations and opinions with respect to the social problem, and the last word, the united note would still be: 'The Organization of Labor on the associative principle.' There are of course dissentients , but such is the note of the majority; and so far as the note is of value, it may be asserted that a decree of the literary faculty of the country has gone forth, declaring the avater of political economy, if not as a science of facts, at least as a supreme rule of government, to be near its close."

        Now strip these and the extracts from Blackwood of their pompous verbiage, and they become express assertions that free society has failed, and that that which is not free must be substituted. Every Southern slave has an estate in tail, indefeasible by fine and recovery, in the lands of the

South. If his present master cannot support him, he must sell him to one who can. Slaves, too, have a valuable property in their masters. Abolitionists overlook this - overlook the protective influence of slavery, its distinguishing feature, and no doubt the cause of its origin and continuance and abuse it as mere engine of oppression. Infant negroes, sick, helpless, aged and infirm negres , are simply a charge to their master; he has no property in them in the common sense of the term, for they are of no value for the time, but they have the most invaluable property in him. He is bound to support them, to supply all their wants, and relieve them of all care for the present or future. And well, and feelingly and faithfully does he discharge his duty. What a glorious thing to man is slavery, when want, misfortune, old age, debility and sickness overtake him. Free society, in its various forms of insurance, in its odd-fellow and temperance societies, in its social and communistic establishments, and in ten thousand other ways, is vainly attempting to attain this never-failing protective, care-taking and supporting feature of slavery. But it will blunder and flounder on in vain. It cannot put a heart and feeling in its societies and its corporations. God makes masters and gives them affections, feelings and interests that secure kindness to the sick, aged and dying slave. Man can never inspire his ricketty

institutions with those feelings, interests and affections. Say the Abolitionists - "Man ought not to have property in man." What a dreary, cold, bleak, inhospitable world this would be with such a doctrine carried into practice. Men living to themselves, like owls and wolves and lions and birds and beasts of prey? No: "Love thy neighbor as thyself." And this can't be done till he has a property in your services as well as a place in your heart. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto! This, the noblest sentiment ever uttered by uninspired man, recognises the great truth which lies at the foundation of all society - that every man has property in his fellow-man! It is because that adequate provision is not made properly to enforce this great truth in free society, that men are driven to the necessity of attempting to remedy the defects of government by voluntary associations, that carry into definite and practical operation this great and glorious truth. It is because such defects do not exist in slave society, that we are not troubled with strikes, trade unions, phalasteries, communistic establishments, Mormonism, and the thousand other isms that deface and deform free society. Socialism, in some form or other, is universal in free society, and its single aim is to attain the protective influence of slavery. St. Simon would govern his social establishments by savants, more despotic than masters. He would

have no law but the will of the savant. He would have a despot without the feelings and the interests of a master to temper his authority. Fourier proposes some wild plan of passional attraction as a substitute for government, and Louis Blanc is eloquent about "attractive labor." All human experience proves that society must be ruled not by mere abstractions, but by men of flesh and blood. To attain large industrial results, it must be vigorously and severely ruled. Socialism is already slavery in all save the master. It had as well adopt that feature at once, as come to that it must to make its schemes at once humane and efficient. Socialism in other forms than that of slavery is not a new thing. It existed in Crete, in Sparta, in Peru, and was practiced by the Essenes in Judea. All ancient institutions were very much tinged with its doctrines and practices, not only in the relation of master and slave, which was universal, but in the connection of the free citizens to one another and to the government. The doctrines of individuality, of the social contract and of laissez-faire, had not then arisen. Our only quarrel with Socialism is, that it will not honestly admit that it owes its recent revival to the failure of universal liberty, and is seeking to bring about slavery again in some form.

        The little experiment of universal liberty that has been tried for a little while in a little corner

of Europe, has resulted in disastrous and appalling failure. Slavery has been too universal not to be necessary to nature, and man struggles in vain against nature. "Expel nature, with a fork, and she will again return;" or, in the eloquent language of Solomon - "The thing that hath been, it is that that shall be; and that which is done, is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun."

        No one who reads a newspaper can but have observed that every abolitionist is either an agrarian, a socialist, an infidel, an anti-renter, or in some way is trying to upset other institutions of society, as well as slavery at the South. The same reasoning that makes him an abolitionist soon carries him further, for he finds slavery in some form so interwoven with the whole framework of society, that he invariably ends by proposing to destroy the whole edifice and building another on entirely new principles. Some, like Fourier, are honest enough to admit that it must also be built with new materials. There is too much human nature in man for their purposes. Part of that nature is the continual effort to make others work and support him whilst he is idle; in other words, to enslave them, and yet not be charged with their support. But Fourier and his disciples promise most positively that their system will in a few generations cleanse mankind of their mundane

dross, expel every particle of human nature, and that then their system will work admirably. Until then, we would advise them to procure good practical overseers from Virginia to govern their phalanxes and phalasteries; and we venture to affirm, if they try one, they will never be willing to change him for that whip-syllabub, sentimental ruler, "passional attraction." Passional attraction is the very thing government has chiefly to check and punish, and we suspect it will be so to the end of the chapter. The argument seems fairly, however, to have arrived at this point: All concur that free society is a failure. We slaveholders say you must recur to domestic slavery, the oldest, the best and most common form of Socialism. The new schools of Socialism promise something better, but admit, to obtain that something, they must first destroy and eradicate man's human nature.

CHAPTER III.

SUBJECT CONTINUED.

                        "There was a time,
                        That when the brains were out, the man would die!"

        Cotemporaneously with the explosion of his favorite theory, Mr. Calhoun folded his robe around him with imperial dignity, and expired in the arms an admiring Senate. Mr. Macaulay and the Edinburgh Review still cling to life with the querulous pertinacity of a pair of cats. "Othello's occupation's gone!" Why does Othello still linger on the stage?

        Since writing our last chapter, the Edinburgh Review for July, 1854, has reached us. It contains a critique on "An Essay on the Relations between Labor and Capital. B. C. Morrison." The failure of free society we think is admitted in that article. We think the writer further admits that it cannot work successfully without a radical change in human nature. The remedy suggested is very simple; chronic and complex as the diseases which it proposes to cure, yet that remedy requires the poor to give up the use of stimulants. We do not think with Lord Byron, "that man being reasonable should get drunk." We think, the contrary, it is the most irrational act in

the world. But change the line a little, and it is true: "Man being natural, will get drunk." Any theory of society founded on the disuse of stimulants by the poor, is Utopian and false. At all events, it involves the necessity of a total change in man’s nature, for men have ever used stimulants, and until such change will ever use them. If the grog and tobacco rations were withdrawn, would not a smaller number of laborers do the work that a larger number do now, and thus throw a number out of employment? When capitalists discovered that laborers could live on less than they do now, would they not reduce their wages? Would not famine be more common, when there was no room for retrenchment, no tobacco and liquor to substitute for bread, when bread rose in price? Such is the theory of Smith and McCulloch, who attribute famines in Ireland to the too great economy of the peasant. We think the proposed remedy would aggravate the disease; but it suffices for our purpose, that the disease is admitted. The failure of laissez-faire, of political economy, is admitted now by its last and lingering votary. Free society stands condemned by the unanimous testimony of all its enlightened members. We will proceed to quote from the article on which we are commenting:

        "A few years ago, when distress among our working people, if not general, was at least chronic

and severe, when the public mind was at once crowded by startling disclosures of misery, and distracted by still more startling projects for relieving it, the book before us would have excited immediate and extensive attention. A few years hence, probably, when the stirring excitement and the noble enterprise of war shall have again given place to the more beneficent pursuits of peace, and when possibly a check to our prosperous career, arising out of war, shall have again awakened our vigilance to those symptoms of social disorder which we are apt to neglect in ordinary times, the book may take the rank it appears to us to deserve. * * * In truth, the great problem it proposes to discuss and elucidate is one of more permanent and mighty interest than any other, however much transient convulsions may throw it into the back-ground, or transient intervals of repose and comfort may lull us into the belief that it is solved or shelved. It is not long since public attention was thoroughly aroused to all that was deplorable, indefensible and dangerous in the condition of the mass of the population; we were daily made aware, that as a fact, the supply of labor was usually in excess of the demand, and much local and occasional suffering was the consequence; but it was not till the Irish famine, and the similar visitation in the Western Highlands, the severe distresses in the manufacturing

districts of England in 1847 and 1848, and the painful and undeniable, even though over-colored, revelations of the state of many thousand artisans of various trades in the metropolis, had alarmed us into inquiry and reflection, that the public mind began to comprehend either the magnitude and imminence of the evil it had to investigate, or the difficulty and complication of the problem it was called upon to solve."

        The reviewer and the reviewed very successfully show, after this, that a movement of the laboring class would be attended with more danger in Great Britain than any where else, because in Great Britain this class compose nine-tenths of the nation. In France, where lands are minutely divided, the conservative interest preponderates. There are thirty thousand landholders in England, three thousand in Scotland, and eleven millions in France. The state of society in Great Britain is pregnant with disastrous change and revolution. Emigration affords a temporary vent and relief, but emigration may cease, and then this complex and difficult social problem will recur. The laboring class are about to assume the reins of government. They know their own numbers and strength. All the reasoning in the world will not satisfy them that they who produce every thing should starve, in order that a handful of lords and capitalists should live in wanton waste and idle luxury. Mr. Morrison

will not persuade them that it is a high crime and misdemeanor for them to use a little beer and tobacco, for they make every ounce of tobacco and pint of beer that is consumed in the kingdom. A social revolution is at hand. Dr. Sangrado could not arrest it with his "bleeding and warm water," much less Mr. Morrison with his cold water remedy. The teetotalers should give him a brass medal, for they, like he, propose to remedy all the evils that human flesh is heir to with abstinence and cold water. The Homeopathists will dispute with the Hydropathists the propriety of conferring on him an honorary title. His infinitesimal dose ranking him with the former, and its ingredient, cold water, allying him with the latter practitioners. The reviewer admits that Great Britain is in danger of a far worse social solution than ever visited France, and has no preventive to suggest except to stop the "grog ration." Now, slavery is the only thing in the world that can enforce temperance. The army and navy are the only reliable temperance societies in Great Britain. Men who have lost self-control enlist in them to be controlled by superior authority. They often prolong their lives thereby. Slaves, like soldiers and sailors, are temperate, because temperance is enforced on them. If free laborers will use too much grog and tobacco, it proves they are not ripe for freedom.

        But we will forego and give up every word of proof that we have deduced from history to shew the failure of free society. In the present and preceding chapters, we know we have adduced sufficient historical evidence of that failure, but we forego all that. We take a single admission of this reviewer - "that the supply of labor is usually excess of the demand." The admission of course only applies to Great Britain, but it is well known that in free continental Europe the excess is still greater. Now, is it necessary for us to do more than state the admission to prove that free society is absurd and impracticable? Part of the laboring class are out of employment and actually starving, and in their struggle to get employment, reducing to the minimum of what will support human existence those next above them who are employed. This next and employed class are the needle-women, and coarse and common male laborers. The two classes and their dependents constitute one-half of mankind. Theoretically, this half of mankind is always at starvation point in free society. Practically, the proportion of the suffering destitute is much greater. We are astounded that conclusions so obviously and immediately resulting from admitted premises, should not have occurred to every one, especially when horrid facts beckoned the way to the conclusion.

        This whole article in the Edinburgh is unfeeling and libellous, unjust and untrue. The greatest destitution and pauperism excludes the use of stimulants. The working women suffer most, and they use few stimulants. The starving peasantry of Scotland, France and Ireland, can rarely indulge in them. It is the well-paid laborers who, after the excessive fatigues of the day, indulge in the pipe and the bottle. Fatigued, maddened and desperate with the prospect before them, some little charity should be extended to their feelings. Such wholesale abuse of the laboring class will but precipitate the social revolution which the reviewer dreads.

CHAPTER IV.

THE TWO PHILOSOPHIES.

energy, enterprise and industry, believe free competition to be an unmixed good.

        The South, quiet, contented, satisfied, looks upon all socialists and radical reformers as madmen or knaves. It is as ignorant of free society as that society is of slavery. Each section sees one side of the subject alone; each, therefore, takes partial and erroneous views of it. Social science will never take a step in advance till some Southern slave-holder, competent for the task, devotes a life-time to its study and elucidation; for slavery can only be understood by living in its midst, whilst thousands of books daily exhibit the minutest workings of free society. The knowledge of the numerous theories of radical reform proposed in Europe, and the causes that have led to their promulgation, is of vital importance to us. Yet we turn away from them with disgust, as from something unclean and vicious. We occupy high vantage ground for observing, studying and classifying the various phenomena of society; yet we do not profit by the advantages of our position. We should do so, and indignantly hurl back upon our assailants the charge, that there is something wrong and rotten in our system. From their own mouths we can show free society to be a monstrous abortion, and slavery to be the healthy, beautiful and natural being which they are trying, unconsciously, to adopt.

CHAPTER V.

NEGRO SLAVERY.

they are so much under the influence of impulse, passion and appetite, that they want sufficient self-control to be deterred or governed by the distant and doubtful penalties of the law. They must be constantly controlled by parents or guardians, whose will and orders shall stand in the place of law for them. Very wicked men must be put into penitentiaries; lunatics into asylums, and the most wild of them into straight jackets, just as the most wicked of the sane are manacled with irons; and idiots must have committees to govern and take care of them. Now, it is clear the Athenian democracy would not suit a negro nation, nor will the government of mere law suffice for the individual negro. He is but a grown up child, and must be governed as a child, not as a lunatic or criminal. The master occupies towards him the place of parent or guardian. We shall not dwell on this view, for no one will differ with us who thinks as we do of the negro’s capacity, and we might argue till dooms-day, in vain, with those who have a high opinion of the negro’s moral and intellectual capacity.

        Secondly. The negro is improvident; will not lay up in summer for the wants of winter; will not accumulate in youth for the exigencies of age. He would become an insufferable burden to society. Society has the right to prevent this, and can only do so by subjecting him to domestic slavery.

        In the last place, the negro race is inferior to the white race, and living in their midst, they would be far outstripped or outwitted in the chase of free competition. Gradual but certain extermination would be their fate. We presume the maddest abolitionist does not think the negro’s providence of habits and money-making capacity at all to compare to those of the whites. This defect of character would alone justify enslaving him, if he is to remain here. In Africa or the West Indies, he would become idolatrous, savage and cannibal, or be devoured by savages and cannibals. At the North he would freeze or starve.

        We would remind those who deprecate and sympathize with negro slavery, that his slavery here relieves him from a far more cruel slavery in Africa, or from idolatry and cannibalism, and every brutal vice and crime that can disgrace humanity; and that it christianizes, protects, supports and civilizes him; that it governs him far better than free laborers at the North are governed. There, wife murder has become a mere holiday pastime; and where so many wives are murdered, almost all must be brutally treated. Nay, more: men who kill their wives or treat them brutally, must be ready for all kinds of crime, and the calendar of crime at the North proves the inference to be correct. Negroes never kill their wives. If it be objected that legally they

have no wives, then we reply, that in an experience of more than forty years, we never yet heard of a negro man killing a negro woman. Our negroes are not only better off as to physical comfort than free laborers, but their moral condition is better.

        But abolish negro slavery, and how much of slavery still remains. Soldiers and sailors in Europe enlist for life; here, for five years. Are they not slaves who have not only sold their liberties, but their lives also? And they are worse treated than domestic slaves. No domestic affection and self-interest extend their aegis over them. No kind mistress, like a guardian angel, provides for them in health, tends them in sickness, and soothes their dying pillow. Wellington at Waterloo was a slave. He was bound to obey, or would, admiral Bying, have been shot for gross misconduct, and might not, like a common laborer, quit his work at any moment. He had sold his liberty, and might not resign without the consent of his master, the king. The common laborer may quit his work at any moment, whatever his contract; declare that liberty is an inalienable right, and leave his employer to redress by a useless suit for damages. The highest and most honorable position on earth was that of the slave Wellington; the lowest, that of the free man who cleaned his boots and fed his hounds. The African

cannibal, caught, christianized and enslaved, is as much elevated by slavery as was Wellington. The kind of slavery is adapted to the men enslaved. Wives and apprentices are slaves; not in theory only, but often in fact. Children are slaves to their parents, guardians and teachers. Imprisoned culprits are slaves. Lunatics and idiots are slaves also. Three-fourths of free society are slaves, no better treated, when their wants and capacities are estimated, than negro slaves. The masters in free society, or slave society, if they perform properly their duties, have more cares and less liberty than the slaves themselves. "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou earn thy bread!" made all men slaves, and such all good men continue to be.

        Negro slavery would be changed immediately to some form of peonage, serfdom or villienage , if the negroes were sufficiently intelligent and provident to manage a farm. No one would have the labor and trouble of management, if his negroes would pay in hires and rents one-half what free tenants pay in rent in Europe. Every negro in the South should be soon liberated, if he would take liberty on the terms that white tenants hold it. The fact that he cannot enjoy liberty on such terms, seems conclusive that he is only fit to be a slave.

        But for the assaults of the abolitionists, much would have been done ere this to regulate and

improve Southern slavery. Our negro mechanics do not work so hard, have many more privileges and holidays, and are better fed and clothed than field hands, and are yet more valuable to their masters. The slaves of the South are cheated of their rights by the purchase of Northern manufactures which they could produce. Besides, if we employ our slaves in the coarser processes of the mechanic arts and manufactures, such as brick making, getting and hewing timber for ships and houses, iron mining and smelting, coal mining, grading railroads and plank roads, in the manufacture of cotton, tobacco, &c. , we would find a vent in new employments for their increase, more humane and more profitable than the vent afforded by new states and territories. The nice finishing processes of manufactures and mechanics should be reserved for the whites, who are fitted for them, and thus, by diversifying pursuits and cutting off dependence on the North, we might benefit and advance the interests of our whole population. Exclusive agriculture has depressed and impoverished the South. We will not here dilate on this topic, because we intend to make it the subject of a separate essay. Free trade doctrines, not slavery, have made the South agricultural and dependent, given her a sparse and ignorant population, ruined her cities, and expelled her people.

        Would the abolitionists approve of a system of society that set white children free, and remitted them at the age of fourteen, males and females, to all the rights, both as to person and property, which belong to adults? Would it be criminal or praiseworthy to do so? Criminal, of course. Now, are the average of negroes equal in information, in native intelligence, in prudence or providence, to well-informed white children of fourteen? We who have lived with them for forty years, think not. The competition of the world would be too much for the children. They would be cheated out of their property and debased in their morals. Yet they would meet every where with sympathizing friends of their own color, ready to aid, advise and assist them. The negro would be exposed to the same competition and greater temptations, with no greater ability to contend with them, with these additional difficulties. He would be welcome nowhere; meet with thousands of enemies and no friends. If he went North, the white laborers would kick him and cuff him, and drive him out of employment. If he went to A