14
pulsory allegiance to the church and a subscription to its creed can
make men pious. And herein the North has tinned against knowl¬
edge. For before the word sociology was invented, or the science it
expresses was thought of, it had united in the promulgation of the
"self-evident truth''—the axiom, that governments derive their just
powers from the consent of the governed:* that is, that the princi¬
ples of every government should express the ideas of its citizens of
what was proper for their society ; or, in other wrords, that it should
conform to the character of their people. But in the case in hand,
the white people of Virginia, upon whom is imposed the burden of
carrying the negroes, deny the suitableness of the government to
themselves; and the negroes are incapableof forming an opinion upon
it. the}7 are political idiots. Yet men who call themselves statesmen
and philanthropists demand that the South shall admit these negroes
to all the rights of citizenship, whilst they, themselves, exclude, as
if they were lepers, the Chinese; w.ho, though heathen, have yet
perhaps the oldest and most stable civilization of the world; thereby
acting in their own case upon a principle which they repudiate in ours.
But the explanation given by our friends, the philanthropists, is
different. They declare that manhood has been whipped out of
these people by the lash of the slave driver. As Rev. Lyman Ab¬
bott, of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, lately informed his people in
an edifying sermon or lecture, "two hundred years of slavery have
so debased the negro of the South that it would require two hundred
years to eradicate the pernicious effects of that institution upon
them.'" Can anv but a bigot or a blind and inveterate hater of the
South accept this as an explanation ?
Can it be imagined that any race of white men, accustomed to the
association and commanding presence of Southern white masters
for 200 years—though the average of slavery is less than 150 years—
and then emancipated and sent to school, could have been so irre¬
sponsive, so dead, to all eiforts at their improvement? Look at the
Jews, a race in our midst to-day Beginning in the dawn of history
as nomads, struggling for national existence against the Egyptians,
Assyrians. Babylonians. Syrians, and Romans; transported by the
whole nation from their native land, they have been for twenty cen¬
turies, or ten times 200 years, the victims of a persecution unparal¬
leled in the history of any other people. In every period of the
world's history, in every nation under heaven, by every sect, they
have been imprisoned, tortured, massacred, sewed up in the skins of
wild beasts and thrown to the dogs in Asia; chained to the galling
car for life in Africa, burned to death in Spain, hayed alive in Italy,
fleeced, tortured, and banished from England, plunged into the cat¬
acombs of France, knouted in Russia, or driven to perish in the
* Declaration of independence.
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