It has been currently asserted that the premises of the abolitionists were embraced in the Declaration of Independence; so that the United States have been committed to them from the beginning. The words usually referred to are the following: "That all men are created equal: that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights: that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," etc. If by these celebrated propositions it was meant that there ever was, or could be, a government where all men enjoyed the same measure of privilege, then it is false. If it was meant that there ever was, or could be, a state of society in which all men could indulge their volitions to the same extent, and that, in every case, the full extent, it is false; for natural and unavoidable differences of persons must ever prevent this. If it were meant that all men are naturally equal, then it would be false; for men are born with different bodily and mental powers, different moral qualities, and different inheritances of rights. If it was meant that every person enters life free from just controul, it is false; for we all begin our existence rightfully subject, irrespective of our consent, to authority in family and State. Neither God nor nature makes it optional with us whether we will be subject to government. But if it be meant that all men are created equal in this sense, that all are children of a common heavenly Father, all common subjects of the law of equity expressed in the "Golden Rule," each one as truly entitled to possess the set of rights justly appropriate to him, (and by the same reason,) as any other is entitled to his set of rights; this is true, and a glorious truth. This is man's moral equality. It means that, under God, the servant is as much entitled to the rights and privileges of a justly-treated servant, as the master is to the rights of a master; that the commoner is as much entitled to the just privileges of a commoner, as a peer to those of a peer. It is the truthful boast of Englishmen, that in their land every man is equal before the law. What does this mean? Does it mean that Lord Derby has no other franchises and privileges than the day-labourer? By no means. But the privileges allotted to the day-labourer by the laws are defended by the same institutions, and adjudicated by the same free principles, and made legally as inviolable, as the very different and larger privileges of Earl Derby. It is in this sense that a just and liberal government holds all men by nature equal. And if, when the Declaration of Independence says that the right of all men to their liberty is "inalienable," the proper definition of civil liberty is accepted, (that it only means privilege to do what each man, in his peculiar circumstances, has a moral right to do,) this also is universally true. But all this is perfectly consistent with differences of social condition, and station, and privilege; where characters and relations are different. As we have seen, the servant for life, who as a slave receives "those things which are just and equal," has his true liberty, though it is different from that of the free citizen; and the servant can no more be justly stripped of this his modicum of liberty, than the master of his. Last, when it is declared that "governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed," there is a sense in which it is true, and one in which it is false. In one sense, they derive their just powers from God, his law, and providence. In the other sense, that the people are not for their rulers, but the rulers for their people, the selection of particular forms of constitution and of the individuals to execute the functions, belongs to the aggregate rectitude and intelligence of the commonwealth, expressed in some way practically fair. But by "the consent of the governed," our wise fathers never intended the consent of each particular human being, competent and incompetent. They intended the representative commonwealth as a body, the "populus," or aggregate corporation of that part of the human beings properly wielding the franchises of full citizens. Their proposition is general, and not particular. The men of 1776 were not vain Ideologues; they were sagacious, practical Englishmen. Thus understood, as every correct thinker does, they teach nothing against difference of privilege among the subjects of government; and consequently, nothing inconsistent with the servitude of those who are found incapable of beneficially possessing a fuller liberty.
Now, the evidence that this only was their meaning is absolutely complete. Had their proposition been that of the Jacobin abolitionist, (that just claim on men's obedience to authority is founded on the individual's consent,) they must have ordered every thing differently from their actual legislation. They could not have countenanced limited suffrage, of which nearly all of them were advocates. They must have taught female suffrage, which the most democratic of them would have pronounced madness. Not only did they retain the African race in slavery, in the face of this declaration, but they refused to adopt full democratic equality, in reconstructing their constitutions. Were these men fools? Were they ignorant of the plain meaning of their own propositions? Did they, like modern Radicals, disdain the plainest obligations of consistency? Some attempt to evade their retention of slavery, by saying that they did not defend its consistency, nor contemplate it as a permanent relation; but the other facts are unanswerable. It may be true that Jefferson, the draughtsman of the Declaration, did heartily adopt his propositions in the sense of the advocates of the social contract; for it is well known that he was properly a Democrat, and not, like the other great Whigs of Virginia, only a Republican; that he had drank deeply into the spirit of Locke's political writings; and that he had already contracted a fondness for the atheistical philosophy of the French political reformers. But who can believe that George Mason, of Gunston, could fail to see the glaring inconsistency between these propositions, taken in the extravagant and radical sense now forced upon them by the abolitionists, and the constitution which he gave to the State of Virginia? According to that immortal instrument, our commonwealth was as distinctly contrasted with a levelling democracy, as any monarchy regulated by laws could possibly be. It was, indeed, a liberal, aristocratic republic. None could vote save the owners of land in fee-simple; and these were permitted to exercise their elective powers directly, only in one sole instance, the election of the General Assembly. This Assembly then exercised, without farther reference to the freeholders, all the powers of the commonwealth. The Assembly elected the Governor of the State. The Assembly appointed all judges of law, and executive officers of State. The county courts, to whom belonged the whole power of police, of local taxation, and of administration of local justice in cases beneath the grade of a felony, formed a proper aristocracy, serving for life, appointing their own clerks and sheriffs, and filling vacancies in their own numbers by a nomination to the Governor, which was always virtually imperative. Such was the government which the statesmen of Virginia deliberately adopted, after signing the Declaration of Independence; than which none could have been devised by human wit, so well adapted to the character and wants of their people, and under which they exhibited the highest political stability and purity which our commonwealth has ever known. Any one who knows the British Constitution will see at a glance, that our Virginian frame of government was not the work of men led by the Utopian dream of "liberty, fraternity, and equality," but of practical statesmen, establishing for their posterity the historical rights of British freemen.
But were the language of the Declaration of Independence as decisive as anti-slavery men suppose, it would concern us exceedingly little. We regard it as no political revelation. When we formed a part of the United States, it was no article of our constitution; and still less are we responsible for it now. If it should be even convicted of embodying some error, this would be neither very surprising, nor very disgraceful to its authors. For what more probable than that men inflamed by the spirit of resistance to tyranny, and surrounded by the excitements of a revolution, in the indiscreet effort to propound a set of abstract generalities as the basis of their action, should mix the plausible errors of the advocates of freedom with the precious truth?
By confounding the master's right to the slave's labour with a pretended property in his conscience, soul, and whole personality, abolitionists have attempted to represent "property in man" as a self-evident wrong. But we shall show that, in the only sense in which we hold it, property in man is recognized by the laws of every commonwealth. The father has property in his child, the master in his apprentice, the husband in his wife, the wife in her husband, and the employer in his hireling. In every one of these cases, this property is recoverable by suits at law, and admits of being transmuted for money, just as any other possession. When the husband is killed by the culpable negligence of a railroad company which had engaged to transport him for hire, the wife sues and recovers money damages. When the daughter is seduced from her father's house, he may sue for compensation, and the court will assess the value of her remaining services until her majority, at such a sum as they judge proper. How is this to be explained, save by regarding the wife as having lawful property in the industry of her husband, and the father as having property in the labour of his daughter? The labour of a minor son is often sold by the father, and thus becomes the property of the purchaser. It is of no avail to say that this labour is voluntary, and that the property originates in the virtual compact between the parties; for this is not true of the parental relation. Still another striking instance of lawful property in the involuntary labour of a fellow-man, appears in the apprenticeship of the children of paupers. Pauperism is not a crime; yet these children are, with undisputed moral propriety, indentured to householders, during their minority; and the labour thus conveyed is hired, sold, bequeathed, just as any other property. Dr. Wayland argues that there cannot be ownership in man, because ownership as he defines it, consists in our "right to use the property as we please!" This definition was made to suit abolitionism, and is not the truth. May we, because we have property in our horses, use them living as we would our logs of wood, for fuel? The ethics of common sense, as that of all true science, (what Dr. W. should have known, if he had been fit to do what he assumed, teach science,) define ownership to be a right to use our property according to its nature. Thus defined, property in man presents no solecism whatever, inconsistent with righteousness.
But it is charged that the injustice of our system is apparent in this, that it takes the slave's labour without compensation. It is simply untrue. Southern slaves received, on the average, better and more certain compensation than any labouring people of their capacity in the world. It came to them in the form of that maintenance, which the master was bound by the laws,[91] as well as his own interests, to bestow upon them. During childhood, they were reared at his expense; in sickness they received maintenance, nursing, and the same medical advice which he provided for his own children; all at his expense. When they married and had children, (which all did, single-blessedness was unknown among them,) their families were provided for by the masters without one additional toil or anxiety on their part. When they died, their orphans had, in the master's estate, an unfailing provision against destitution; and if old age overtook them, they received, without labour, the same supplies and comforts which were allotted to them in their prime. How many of the sons of toil in nominally free countries would seize with rapture the offer of such wages for their labour, if the name of slavery were detached from them? To be able to secure, by the moderate labours of their active years, a certain and liberal provision for their daily wants, for their families, however large, and for sickness and old age, would be a contract so advantageous, in comparison with the hardships and uncertainties of the peasant's usual life, that few thoughtful persons of that class would hesitate, from love of novelty or dim hope of a more lucky career, to embrace it. But this is just what our laws and customs gave to our slaves, as wages of their easy labour.
But the anti-slavery man objects, that the adjustment of this compensation is made at the will of the master alone, while the slave has no power to influence it. This is precisely the same objection, in effect, with the one that the labour is involuntary. We have already shown that this circumstance alone does not make the claim on the labour unjust. And if the system makes for the slave, on the average, a better bargain than he could make for himself, where is his hardship? Is he injured by being restrained of the liberty of injuring himself? Surely, the fairness of any system should be judged by the fairness of its average results. If some masters withhold a part of the due wages, by failing to "render to their servants that which is just and equal," this is their individual fault, not that of the system. St. Paul, in the passage quoted, manifestly thought that we might hold the involuntary labour of our slaves, and yet be no robbers.
But our enemies return to the charge, urging that we robbed our slaves, because we engrossed to ourselves the lion's share of the bondsman's labour. The master and his family, say they, who did no work, rolled in luxury, while the poor slaves, who did all, got only such a pittance as was needed to preserve their capacity for toil. This is false in every part. Masters and their families were not idlers. Their life was not relatively luxurious. The slave's share was not a pittance, but much more like the lion's share. But, they exclaim: "Let the masters stand aside and allow the slaves to enjoy the whole fruits of the estates they cultivate: then only will the former cease to be robbers." This astonishing folly is exposed by simply asking, whether capital and superintending skill are not entitled to wages, as well as labour? The crops of the Southern plantation were the joint fruit of the master's capital, the master's labour and skill of oversight, and the slaves' labour. If capital be denied all remuneration, the wheels of productive industry would stop everywhere, to the especial ruin of the labouring classes. Does the anti-slavery manufacturer of Lowell or Manchester think it fair, after investing his thousands in fixtures and material, and bestowing his anxious superintendence, that his operatives should claim the whole profits of the factory, leaving him not a penny, because, forsooth, he never spun or wove a thread? Away with the nonsense! Southern slaves enjoyed a larger share of the proceeds of conjoined capital, superintending skill, and labour, than any operatives in the world. This is not only allowed, but virtually asserted, by anti-slavery men, when they reason that slavery is an economical evil, because the maintenance of slaves is more costly, in proportion to the value of their labour, than that of free labourers. Thus, in one place, they object that slaves receive too much compensation, and in another, that they receive too little. Nor is it true that Southern masters usually make no contribution of labour to the products of their farms. There is nowhere a population of equal wealth, more industrious than slaveholders. The master usually contributes far more to the common production than the strongest labourer on his estate; and the mistress more than the most industrious female servant, partly in the labours of superintendence, but also in actual toil.
It is argued by abolitionists, that slavery regularly exerts many influences tending to degrade the moral character of both masters and servants. Their charge cannot be better stated than in the Words of Dr. Wayland. ["Moral Science," Personal Liberty, Ch. I., § 2.]
"Its effects must be disastrous upon the morals of both parties. By presenting objects on whom passion may be satiated without resistance, and without redress, it tends to cultivate in the master, pride, anger, cruelty, selfishness, and licentiousness. By accustoming the slave to subject his moral principles to the will of another, it tends to abolish in him all moral distinctions, and thus fosters in him, lying, deceit, hypocrisy, dishonesty, and a willingness to yield himself up to minister to the appetites of his master. That in all slaveholding countries there are exceptions to this remark, and that there are principles in human nature which, in many cases, limit the effect of these tendencies, may be gladly admitted. Yet that such is the tendency of slavery as slavery, we think no reflecting person can for a moment hesitate to allow."
This is a flattering picture of us, truly! By good fortune, it is drawn by one who knows nothing of us. Just such are the current representations which Yankees have made of Southern morals, down to the notable instance of Senator Sumner's speech on the "Barbarism of Slavery." The question whether the system of slave labour deteriorates the morals of master and servant, as compared with that of free labour, may be treated as one of deduction and reasoning, or one of fact. The latter is the more trustworthy way to decide it. Dr. Wayland undertakes to settle it solely by the former. And it is manifest to the first glance, that his whole reasoning begs the question. If the very relation is wicked, if every act of authority on the master's part is a wrong, and of submission on the servant's part is a surrender of his right, then the reasoning is plausible. But let us suppose, for argument's sake, (what may be true, as it is the very point undecided,) that the relation may be right, the authority exercised lawful, and the things our servants are usually enjoined to do, innocent acts. Then, the fact that there is authority on one side and obedience on the other, cannot tend, of itself, to degrade ruler and ruled: for if this were so, the parental relation itself (ordained by God as His school of morals for young human beings) would be a school of vice. But the argument is a sophism, in a yet more audacious and insulting sense. Its author argues the degradation of the slave, chiefly because his wicked master compels him by fear to do so many wicked things. But suppose the master to be a gentleman, and not a brute, so that the things he customarily compels the slave to do, are right things; where, then, is the argument? Which of the two characters masters usually bear, is the question to be solved at the conclusion of the reasoning, and, yet more, to be decided by the surer testimony of fact. But Dr. Wayland chooses to begin by presuming, à priori, that masters are generally rascals.
Wisdom would infer, on the contrary, that the habitual exercise of authority, approved as righteous by the ruler's conscience, tends to elevate his character. He who would govern others must first govern himself. Hence, we should expect to find him who is compelled to exercise a hereditary and rightful authority, a man more self-governed, thoughtful, considerate, firm, and dignified, than other men. The habit of providing constantly for a number of persons, whom he is impelled by the strongest self-interest to care for efficiently, should render a man considerate of others, and benevolent. Experience will soon teach the head of such an estate, that his relation with his dependents must be any thing else than a carnival of self-indulgence, violence, and tyranny; for such a life will speedily leave him no servants to abuse. On the contrary, the very necessities of his position compel him to be, to a certain extent, provident, methodical, and equitable. Without these virtues, his estate slips rapidly away. And who, that knows human nature, can fail to see the powerful effects of the institution in developing, in the ruling caste, a higher sentiment of personal honour, chivalry, and love of liberty? This was asserted of the slaveholders of Virginia and the Carolinas by the sagacious Burke. It is very true, that if every man in the country were under the vital influence of Christian sanctification, he would not need these more human influences to elevate his character. But the wise statesman takes men as they are, not as they should be. Until the millennium, the elevating influences of social position will continue to be of great practical value. Yankeedom, at least, continues thus far to exhibit a great want of them.
But now, in considering the actual influences of slavery on the morals of the Africans, let the reader remember what they actually were before they were placed under this tutelage. He may be sure they were not what abolitionism loves to picture them, a sort of Ebony Arcadians, full of simple, pastoral purity, and of what infidels vainly prate as the dignity of native virtue. It is not slavery which has degraded them from that imaginary elevation. On the contrary, they were what God's word declares human depravity to be under the degrading effects of paganism. Let the reader see the actual and true picture, in the first chapter of Romans, and in authentic descriptions of the negro in his own jungles, such as the invaluable work of Dr. John Leighton Wilson, on the tribes of the Guinea coast. And here, moreover, he will find proof, that the type of savage life brought to America originally by the slave trade, was far below that witnessed in Africa among the more noticeable tribes; because the great bulk of the slaves were either the Pariahs of that barbarous society, or the kidnapped members of the feeble fragments of bush tribes, who had nearly perished before the comparative civilization of the Mandingoes and Greboes, living but one remove above the apes around them. Now cannot common sense see the moral advantage to such a people, of subjection to the will of a race elevated above them, in morals and intelligence, to an almost measureless degree? Is it no moral advantage to be compelled to wear decent clothing, and to observe at least the outward proprieties which should obtain between the sexes? None to be taught industry, in place of pagan laziness; and methodical habits, in place of childish waste and unthrift? The destructive effects of the savage's common vices, lying, theft, drunkenness, laziness, waste, upon business and pecuniary interests, will of course prompt masters to repress those vices, if no higher motive does. Is this no gain for the poor pagan? Especially does the matter of drunkenness illustrate, in a splendid manner, the benign effects of our system on African character and happiness. Place any savage race beside a civilized and commercial people, and leave them free; and the speedy result is, that the "fire-water" consumes and depopulates them. Witness the North American Indians. But here was just such a race, in the midst of the temptation and opportunity, and yet preserved from all appreciable evil from this source, and advancing in physical comfort, manners, and numbers, more rapidly than any white race in Christendom. While numbers of Africans exhibited just that weakness for ardent spirits, which is to be expected in people lately barbarians, yet so wholesome were the restraints of that regular and constant occupation enforced upon them, it was the rarest thing in the world that a farm-servant filled a drunkard's grave among us. But now the flood-gates are opened. Was not Dr. Wayland a temperance man? Southern slavery was the most efficient temperance society in the world.
Once more, was it nothing, that this race, morally inferior, should be brought into close relations to a nobler race, so that the propensity to imitation should be stimulated by constant and intimate observation, by domestic affection, by the powerful sentiment of allegiance and dependence? And above all, was it nothing that they should be brought, by the relation of servitude, under the consciences and Christian zeal of a Christian people, in circumstances which most powerfully enlisted their sense of responsibility, and gave free scope to their labour of love? Let the blessed results answer, of a nation of four millions lifted, in four generations, out of idolatrous debasement, "sitting clothed, and in their right mind;" of more than half a million adult communicants in Christian churches! And all this glorious work has been done exclusively by Southern masters; for never did foreign or Yankee abolitionist find leisure from the more congenial work of slandering the white, to teach or bless the black man in any practical way. This much-abused system has thus accomplished for the Africans, amidst universal opposition and obloquy, more than all the rest of the Christian world together has accomplished for the rest of the heathen.
It is the delight of abolitionists to impute to slavery a result peculiarly corrupting as to sins of unchastity. Witness the repetitions charges by Dr. Wayland, of these sins, as contaminating both masters and slaves, in consequence of slavery. The evidence of facts has been already given as to the comparative justice of this charge. But reason itself would suggest to the least reflection, that Southern households are not the only ones where young men and female domestics are thrown together, amidst all the temptations and opportunities of privacy and domestic intimacy; that the power of corporal punishment, unlawful here for this end, is not the only power which a superior may apply to an inferior to overcome her chastity, nor the most effective. But, on the other hand, reason would suggest that the employment of free persons of the same colour and race would greatly enhance the force of those temptations; while among us, the differences of colour, race, and personal attractions, would greatly diminish them; while the very sentiment of superior caste would render the intercourse more repulsive and unnatural.
The testimony of facts, however, is the conclusive evidence on the question, whether our system is relatively more corrupting than that of free labour. In this department of the discussion, Providence has given us a refutation against the Yankees so terribly biting, as fully to satisfy any indignation which their arrogant railings may have excited in our bosoms. We were placed together at the beginning of our national existence, under the same Federal government, and under similar religious and State institutions. Our union presented a common field for constant meeting and comparison. And what were the results disclosed? It has been shown that while the South, as a great section of the Union, never, in one single instance, made any general or united movement to pervert Federal laws and powers for unfair local purposes; while the South ever manifested a chivalrous patriotism against any assaults upon the common rights; the North has never failed, from the first year of the government, to use it as a machine for legislative extortion and local advantage; and the North has usually played the traitor to the common cause when assailed from without, even when, as in the second war with England, the interests assailed by the foreign enemy, and generously defended by the South, were more peculiarly her own. It has appeared that when at last legislative peculation grew so foul that the publick demanded inquiry, every member of the Congress convicted of that disgraceful iniquity, was from the North, and not one from the South. If we pass to personal comparisons, the publick men of the South have shown themselves, on the federal arena, superior, in general, in the talent of command, in personal honour, in dignity, in the amenities of life, in forbearance and self-controul; while that very petulance, wilfulness, and love of arbitrary power, which, abolition philosophers infer, must be the peculiar fruits of slaveholding, were exhibited in marked contrast, by the few Northern Presidents who had the fortune to reach that high position. Compare, for instance, the benign Washington, a great slaveholder, with that petty tyrant, the elder Adams; or Jefferson, Madison and Monroe with his son, (worthy son of such a sire,) John Quincy Adams; or Jefferson Davis with Abraham Lincoln; or our Lee, Johnstons, Jackson and Beauregard, with a McNeill and a Butler! So well proved are the superior courtesy, liberality, and humanity of the Southern gentleman, that the very porters on the wharves, and waiters in the hotels, of Northern cities, recognize them by these traits. It has been the fashion of a certain type of poltroons among the Yankees, who wish to indulge the anger and malignity of the bully, along with the safety and impunity of the Quaker, to represent the resort of Southerners to the code of honour, as a peculiar proof of their uncivilized condition. They exclaim triumphantly that we fight duels, while Yankees do not. Now the code of honour is certainly irrational, unchristian, and wicked. But there is another thing that is greatly more wicked; and this is the disposition to inflict upon a fellow-man the injuries and insults which that code proposes to prevent; and then cloak one's self under the cowardly pretence of a conscience which forbids to fight. The duellist sins by anger and revenge: these sneaking hypocrites sin by anger and revenge, and cowardice and lying, at once. The truly good man is forbidden by his conscience from seeking retaliation; but the same conscience equally forbids him to inflict on others the injuries which provoke retaliation. The man who wilfully injures his fellow, has therefore no right to plead conscience, for refusing satisfaction. It is not conscience, but cowardice. While, then, we mourn the crimes of violent retaliation which sometimes occur at the South, the citizens of the North have occasion for a deeper blush, at the crimes of malignant slander and vituperation which their people are accustomed to launch at us from the vile hiding-place of their hypocritical puritanism.
It will be seen by every one, that the females of the ruling class must be very intimately concerned in the duties of the relation of master and servant. It is properly termed domestic slavery; and woman's functions are wholly domestic. If then, slavery is morally corrupting, Southern ladies should show the sad result very plainly. But what says fact? Its testimony is one which fills the heart of every Southern man with grateful pride; that the Southern lady is proverbially eminent for all that adorns female character, for grace, for purity and refinement, for benevolence, for generous charity, for dignified kindness and forbearance to inferiours, for chivalrous moral courage, and for devout piety.
We might safely submit the comparative soundness of Southern society to this test: that it has never generated any of those loathsome isms, which Northern soil breeds, as rankly as the slime of Egypt its spawn of frogs. While the North has her Mormons, her various sects of Communists, her Free Lovers, her Spiritualists, and a multitude of corrupt visionaries whose names and crimes are not even known among us, our soil has never proved congenial to the birth or introduction of a single one of these inventions.
But the crowning refutation of this slander against Southern morals, is presented by the great war lately concluded—a refutation whose glory repays us for long years of reproach. Dispassionate spectators abroad have passed their verdict of disgust upon the combination of feebleness in the field, boasting and falsehood at home, venality and peculation towards their own treasury and the property of private citizens, with ruthless violation of all the laws of humanity. Dispassionate spectators! No; there were none such: but from ignorant and prejudiced minds stuffed with misconceptions by our interested assailants, the splendid disclosure of civic and military genius, bravery, fortitude under incredible hardships, magnanimity under unspeakable provocations, and dignity under defeat, which appeared at the South, drew a general acclaim of admiration from the whole civilized world. This war, among its many evils, has done us this good, that it has settled for this century the charge of the "barbarism of Southern slavery."
But it may not be amiss to reveal those vices which are peculiarly opposed to the Yankees' own boasts, as the inhabitants of "the land of steady habits." Our soldiers who have been prisoners of war among them, all report that their camps were Pandemoniums, for their resounding blasphemies and profanities. Nothing was more common than the capture from them of prisoners of war, too drunk to walk steadily. The mass of the letters found upon their slain, and about their captured camps, disclosed a shocking prevalence of prurient and licentious thought, both in their armies and at home. And our unfortunate servants seduced away by their armies, usually found, to their bitter cost, that lust for the African women was a far more prevalent motive, than their pretended humanity, for their liberating zeal. Such was the monstrous abuse to which these poor creatures were subjected, that decent slave fathers often hid their daughters in the woods, from their pretended liberators, as from beasts of prey.
We freely avow that the line of argument which occupies this section is not to our taste; nor, as was intimated in the introduction, do we regard it as the safest means of ascertaining the moral influences of the two systems. But it has not been by our choice that it has been introduced. The slanders of our accusers have thrust it upon us. We now gladly dismiss it with this general concluding remark; that the comparative general virtue of Southern masters, and the purity of Southern Christianity, are a strong evidence that we were not living in a criminal relation, as to the African race. For sins are always gregarious. One sin, permanently established in the heart and life, always introduces its foul kindred. Sin is contagious. An unsound spot in the character ultimately taints the whole. The misguided gentleman who first yields to the passion of gaming, solely for its amusement and excitement, cannot continue a habitual gamester and a gentleman. The ingenuous youth who harbours the habit of intoxication, in due time ceases to be even ingenuous. These unhallowed passions, once established, introduce fraud, selfishness, meanness, falsehood. So, we argue, if slaveholding were a sin, its practice would surely tell upon the honour and integrity of those who continue in it. But Southern character exhibits no such general effect.
It is a plausible ground of opposition to slavery, to charge it with the guilt of the slave trade. It is argued that unless we are willing to justify the capture of free and innocent men, on their own soil, and their reduction from freedom to slavery, with all the enormous injustice and cruelty of the African slave trade, we must acknowledge that the title of the Southern master to his slave at this day is unrighteous; that a system which had its origin in wrong cannot become right by the lapse of time; that, if the title of the piratical slave catcher on the coast of Africa was unrighteous, he cannot sell to the purchaser any better title than he has; and that an unsound title cannot become sound by the passage of time. It need hardly be said that we abhor the injustice, cruelty, and guilt of the African slave trade. It is justly condemned by the public law of Christendom—a law which not Wilberforce, nor the British Parliament, nor British, nor Yankee Abolitionists, have the honour of originating, but the slaveholding Commonwealth of Virginia. It is condemned by the law of God. Moses placed this among the judicial statutes of the Jews: "And he that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death." We fully admit, then, that the title of the original slave catcher to the captured African was most unrighteous. But few can be ignorant of the principle, that a title, originally bad, may be replaced by a good one, by transmission from hand to hand, and by lapse of time. When the property has been acquired, by the latest holder, fairly and honestly; when, in the later transfers, a fair equivalent was paid for it, and the last possessor is innocent of fraud in intention and in the actual mode of his acquisition of it, more wrong would be effected by destroying his title, than by leaving the original wrong unredressed. Common sense says, that whatever may have been the original title, a new and valid one has arisen out of the circumstances of the case. If this principle be denied, half the property of the civilized world will be divorced from its present owners. All now agree that the pretext which gave ground for the conquest of William of Normandy was wicked; and however just it might have been, by the laws of nations, the conquest of the government of a country ought not to disturb the rights of individuals in private property. The Norman Conquest resulted in a complete transfer of almost all the land in England to the hands of new proprietors; and nearly all the land titles of England, at the present day, are the legal progeny of that iniquitous robbery, which transferred the territory of the kingdom from the Saxon to the Norman barons. If lapse of time, and change of hands, cannot make a bad title good, then few of the present landlords of England have any right to their estates. Upon the same principles, the tenants leasing from them have no right to their leases, and consequently they have no right to the productions of the farms they hold. If they have no right to those productions, then they cannot communicate any right to those who purchase from them; so that no man eating a loaf of English bread, or wearing a coat of English wool, could be certain that he was not consuming what was not his own. Thus extravagant and absurd are the results of such a principle. Let us apply to the abolitionists their own argument, and we shall unseat the most of them from the snug homes whence they hurl denunciations at us. It is well known that their forefathers obtained the most of that territory from the poor Indians, either by fraud or violence. If lapse of time and subsequent transfers cannot make a sound title in place of an unsound one, then few of the people of the North have any right to the lands they hold; and, as honest men, they are bound to vacate them. To this even as great a man as Dr. Wayland, the philosopher of abolitionism, has attempted an answer, by saying that this right, arising from possession, only holds so long as the true, original owner, or the inheritor of his right, does not appear; and that, when he appears, the right of possession perishes at once. But he argues, the original and true claimant to the ownership of the slave is always present, in the person of the slave himself; so that the right originating in possession cannot exist for a moment. Without staying to inquire whether the presence of the inheritor of the original right necessarily puts an end to this right of possession—a proposition worse than questionable—I would simply remark, that, to represent the slave himself as the possessor of the original right, is a complete begging of the question. It assumes the very point in dispute, whether the right of the master is sound or not. And we would add, what would the courts of New England, what would Dr. Wayland say, should the feeble remnants of the New England Indians, who are yet lingering in those States, claim all the fair domains of their tribe? And what would be said in England, if the people of Saxon descent should rise upon all those noble houses who boast a Norman origin, and claim their princely estates?
But we carry this just argumentum ad hominem nearer home. If the Virginian slaveholder derived from the New England or British slave-trader, no valid title to the African, then the trader had no valid title to the planter's money. What can be clearer than this? And if continued possession, with lapse of time, and transmission from hand to hand, cannot convert an unsound title into a sound one, all the wealth acquired by the African slave trade, together with all its increase, is wrongfully held by the heirs of those slave dealers: it belongs to the heirs of the planters from whom it was unjustly taken. Now it is well known that the New England States, and especially the little State of Dr. Wayland, Rhode Island, drew immense sums from the slave trade; and it was said of the merchants of Liverpool and Bristol, that the very bricks of their houses were cemented with the blood of the slave. Who can tell how much of the wealth which now freights the ships, and drives the looms of these anti-slavery marts, is the fruit of slave profits? Let the pretended owners disgorge their spoils, and restore them to the Virginian planters, to indemnify them for the worthless and fictitious title to the slaves whom they have been called upon to emancipate; in order that means may be provided to make their new liberty a real blessing to them. Thus we should have a scheme for emancipation, or colonization, which would be just in both its aspects. But will abolitionism assent to this? About as soon as death will surrender its prey. Let them cease, then, for shame's sake, to urge this sophism.
If this principle of a right originated by possession can be sound anywhere, it is sound in its application to our slaves. The title by which the original slave catchers held them may have been iniquitous. But these slave catchers were not citizens of the Southern colonies; these slaves were not brought to our shores by our ships. They were presented by the inhuman captors, dragged in chains from the filthy holds of the slave ships; and the alternative before the planter was, either to purchase them from him who possibly had no right to sell them, or re-consign them to fetters, disease, and death. The slaves themselves hailed the conclusion of a sale with joy, and begged the planters to become their masters, as a means of rescue from their floating prison. The planters, so far as they were concerned, paid a fair commercial equivalent for the labour of the slaves; and the right so acquired passed legally through generations from father to son, or seller to purchaser. The relation, so iniquitously begun in those cases where the persons imported were not slaves already in Africa, has been fairly and justly transferred to subsequent owners, and has resulted in blessings to the slaves. Its dissolution is more mischievous to them than to the masters. Must it not be admitted that the injustice in which the relation originated no longer attaches to it? The difference between the title of the original slave catcher, and that of the late Virginian slave owner, is as great as between the ruffian Norman freebooter, who conquered his fief at Hastings, and his law-abiding descendant, the Christian gentleman of England.
To deny the mischievous effects of emancipation upon the Africans themselves, requires an amount of impudence which even abolitionists seldom possess. The experience of Britain has demonstrated, to the satisfaction of all her practical statesmen, that freedom among the whites is ruinous to the blacks. They tell us of the vast decline in the productiveness of their finest colonies, of the lapsing of fruitful plantations into the bush, of the return of the slaves, lately an industrious and useful peasantry, to savage life, and of the imperative necessity for Asiatic labour, to rescue their lands from a return to the wilderness. A comparison between the slaves of the South, and the freed negroes of the North, gives the same results. While the former were cheerful, healthy, progressive, industrious, and multiplying rapidly in numbers, the latter are declared by their white neighbours to be a social nuisance, depressed by indolence and poverty, decimated by hereditary diseases, and tending rapidly to extinction.
We argue hereupon, that it cannot be a moral duty to bestow upon the slave that which is nothing but an injury. It cannot be a sin to do to him that which uniformly and generally is found essential to his well-being in his present condition. We certainly are not required by a benevolent God to ruin him in order to do him justice! No sober and practical mind can hold such an absurdity. Hence we may know, even in advance of examination, that the ethical premises, the theory of human rights, which lead to such preposterous conclusions, must be false. To illustrate this argument, the humane effects of slavery upon the slave should be more fully exhibited. This we propose to attempt in another chapter.
We are not propagandists of slavery. The highest wish of Virginia with reference to it was, that now it had been fastened on her against her remonstrances by others, she should be let alone to manage it as she judged the best: a right which had been solemnly pledged to her by her present aggressors. We had no desire to force it on others, or to predict its universal prevalence, as the best organization of society. But having claimed that the Word of God and publick justice authorize it, we admit that it is reasonable we should meet those who assert economical and social results of it so evil, as to render it in credible that a wise and benevolent God should sanction such a mischief. We hope to show that slavery, instead of being wasteful, impoverishing, and mischievous, is so far useful and benevolent as to vindicate the divine wisdom in ordaining it, and to show that we were wisely content with our condition so far as this relation of labour and capital was concerned.
We would also urge this preliminary remark: that the economical effects of American slavery have usually been argued from an amazingly unreasonable point of view. Our enemies persist in discussing it as an election to be made between a system of labour by christianized, enlightened, free yeomen of the same race, on one hand; and a system of labour by African slaves on the other; as though the South had any such election in its power! It was not a thing for us to decide, whether we should have these Africans, or civilized, free, white labour; the former were here; here, not by the choice of our forefathers, but forced upon us by the unprincipled cupidity of the slave-trading ancestors of the Abolitionists of Old and New England who now revile us; forced upon us against the earnest protest of Virginia. Did Abolitionists ever propose a practical mode of removing them, and supplying their places, which would not inflict on both parties more mischief than slavery occasion? They should have showed us some way to charm the four millions of Africans among us, away to some happy Utopia, where they might be more comfortable than we made them; and to repair the shock caused by the abstraction of all this productive labour. Until they did this, the question was not whether it would be wisest for a legislator creating a totally new community, to form it like Scotland or New England; or like Virginia. The true question was, these Africans being here, and there being no humane or practicable way to remove them, what shall be done with them? If the social condition of Virginia exhibited points of inferiority in its system of labour, to that of its rivals, the true cause of the evil was to be sought in the presence of the Africans among us, not in his enslavement. We shall indeed assert, and prove, that these points of inferiority were vastly fewer and smaller than our enemies represent. But, we emphatically repeat, the source of the evils apparent in our industrial system was the presence among us of four millions of heterogeneous pagan, uncivilized, indolent, and immoral people; and for that gigantic evil, slavery was, in part at least, the lawful, the potent, the beneficent remedy. Without this, who cannot see that such an incubus must have oppressed and blighted every interest of the country? Such an infusion must have tainted the sources of our prosperity. It would have been a curse sufficient to paralyze the industry, to corrupt the morals, and to crush the development of any people on earth, to have such a race spread abroad among them like the frogs of Egypt. And that the South not only delivered itself from this fate, but civilized and christianized this people, making them the most prosperous and comfortable peasantry in the world, developed a magnificent agriculture, and kept pace with the progress of its gigantic rival, attests at once the energy of our people, and the wisdom and righteousness of the expedient by which all this has been accomplished
Intelligent men at the South found something to reconcile them to their condition, in the wholesome influence of their form of labour, upon their republican institutions. The effect of slavery to make the temper of the ruling caste more honourable, self-governed, reflective, courteous, and chivalrous, and to foster in them an intense love of, and pride in, their free institutions, has been already asserted, and substantiated by resistless facts. The testimony of these facts is concurrent with that of all history. But those qualities are just the ones which fit a people for beneficent self-government. Again: our system disposed, at one potent touch, of that great difficulty which has beset all free governments: the difficulty of either entrusting the full franchises of the ruling caste to, or refusing them to, the moneyless class. The Word of God tells us that the poor shall always be with us. Natural differences of capacity, energy, and thrift, will always cause one part to distance the other part of the society, in the race of acquisition; and the older and denser any population becomes, the larger will be the penniless class, and the more complete their destitution as compared with the moneyed class. Shall they be refused all participation in the suffrage and powers of government? Then, by what means shall the constitution make them secure against the iniquities of class-legislation, which wickedly and selfishly sacrifices their interests and rights to the ruling class? And yet more: by what argument can they be rendered content in their political disfranchisement, when they are of the same race, colour, and class, with their unauthorized oppressors, save as money makes an artificial distinction? The perpetual throes and reluctations of the oppressed class against the oppressors, will agitate and endanger any free government; as witness the strifes of the conservative and radical parties in England, and the slumbering eruptions which the ideas of the democrats of 1848 have kindled under every throne in Western Europe. But on the other hand, if the full franchises of the ruling class be conceded to the moneyless citizens, they seize the balance of power, and virtually hold the reins over the rights, property, and lives of the moneyed classes. But the qualities which have made them continue penniless in a liberal government, together with the pressure of immediate hardship, destitution, ignorance and passion, will ever render them most unsafe hands to hold this power. The man who has "the wolf at his door," who knows not where to-morrow's dinner for his wife and babes is to be obtained, is no safe man to be entrusted with power over others' property, and submitted to all the arts and fiery passions of the demagogue. The inevitable result will be, that his passions will drive him, under the pressure of his destitution, to some of those forms of agrarianism or legislative plunder, by which order and economical prosperity are blighted; and society is compelled, like democratic France and New England, to take refuge from returning anarchy and barbarism, in the despotism of a single will. This truth cannot be more justly stated than in the language of Lord Macaulay, himself once an ardent advocate of British Reform. If the democratic States of America seemed, for a time, to offer an exception to these tendencies, it proves nothing; for in those States, the intense demand for labour, the cheapness of a virgin soil, and the rapid growth of a new and sparse population, rendered the working of the law, for a time, imperceptible. But even there, it had begun to work with a portentous power. Witness the violence and frightful mutations of their parties, the loathsome prevalence of demagogueism, and the great party of free-soil, which is but a form of agrarianism reaching out its plundering hand against the property class across Mason's and Dixon's lines, instead of the property class at home. So completely had the danger we have described been verified, even in these new and prosperous communities, that the moment a serious strain came upon their institutions, the will of the mob burst over constitutions and publick ethics like a deluge, and the pretended republicks rushed into a centralized despotism, with a speed and force which astounded the world. All the pleas of universal suffrage have received a damning and final refutation, from the events of this revolution.
But the solution which Southern institutions gave to this great dilemma of republicks was happy and potent. The moneyless labouring class was wholly disfranchised of political powers, and thus disarmed of its powers of mischief. Yet this was effected without injustice to them, or cruelty; because they were at the same time made parts of the families of the ruling class; and ensured an active protection and competent maintenance, by law, and by motives of affection and self-interest in the masters; which experience proved to be more beneficent in practice to the labouring class, than any political expedient of free countries. The tendency of our African slavery was to diminish, at the same time, the numbers and destitution of the class of white moneyless men, so as to render them a harmless element in the State. It did this by making for them a wider variety of lucrative industrial pursuits; by making acquisition easier for white people; by increasing the total of property, that is to say, of values held as property, vastly, through the addition of the labour of the Africans, and by diffusing a general plenty and prosperity. We very well know that anti-slavery men are accustomed to assert the contrary of all this: but we know also, that they affirm that whereof they know nothing. The census returns of the anti-slavery government of the United States itself stubbornly refute them; showing that the number and average wealth of the property classes at the South were relatively larger, and that white pauperism and destitution were relatively vastly smaller, than at the North. But the violent abolition of slavery here has exploded into thin air every sophism by which it has been argued that it was adverse to the interests of the non-slaveholding whites. The latter have been taught by a hard experience, to know, with a painful completeness of conviction before which the old anti-slavery arguments appear insolent and mocking madness, that they are more injured than the slaveholders. They see, that while the late masters are reduced from country gentlemen to yeomen landholders, they are reduced from a thrifty, reputable middle class, to starving competitors for day labour with still more starving free negroes. The honest abolitionist (if there is such a thing) needs only to take the bitter testimony of the non-slaveholding whites of the South, to unlearn forever this part of his theory. Thus did African slavery among us solve this hard problem; and place before us a hopeful prospect of a long career of freedom and stability.
The comparative history of the free and slaveholding commonwealths of the late United States substantiates every word of the above. The South, as a section, has never, from the foundation of the government, committed itself to any project of unrighteous class legislation, such as tariffs, sectional bounties, or agrarian plunderings of the public domain. The North has been perpetually studying such attempts. The South has ever been remarked, (and strange to say, often twitted,) for the stability and consistency of its political parties. The Northern States have been "all things by turns, and nothing long," save that they have been ever steady in their devotion to their plans of legislative plunder. The South has been a stranger to mobs, rebellions, and fanaticism. When, for instance, the wicked crotchet of Know-nothingism was invented, it seized the brains of the North like an infection. It carried all before it until it came to Virginia, the first of the Southern States which it essayed to enter, when the old Commonwealth quietly arose and placed her foot upon its neck, and the monster expired at once. From the day Virginia cast her vote against it, it never gained another victory, either North or South. But the crowning evidence of the superior stability of our freedom was presented during the recent war. While its stress upon Northern institutions crushed them at once into a pure despotism, the South sustained the tremendous ordeal with the combined energy of a monarchy and the equity of a liberal republick. There was no mob law; no terrorizing of dissentients, no intimidations at elections, nor meddling with their purity and freedom, no infringement of rights by class legislation, no riots nor mobs, save one or two small essays generated by foreigners, and no general suspension of the Habeas Corpus, until the pressure of the war had virtually converted the whole country into a camp: and this, even then, was only enacted by the constitutional authority of the Congress. The liberty of the press and of religion was untouched during the whole struggle. Let the contrast be now drawn. Shall the tree be known by its fruits?
We believe, therefore, that we have no cause, in this respect, to lament the condition which Providence had assigned us, in placing this African Race among us. We do not envy the political condition of our detractors, Yankee and British radicals; of the former with their colluvies gentium, the off-scouring of all the ignorance and discontent of Europe, and their frantic agrarianism, which will turn, so soon as it has exhausted its expected prey from the homesteads of Southern planters, to ravage at home; and of the latter, with their disorganizing theories of human right, subversive of every bulwark of the time-honored British Constitution, and their increasing mass of turbulent pauperism.
Taking mankind as they are, and not as we may desire them to be, domestic slavery offered the best relation which has yet been found, between labour and capital. It is not asserted that it would be best for a Utopia, where we might imagine the humblest citizen virtuous, intelligent, and provident. But there are no such societies on earth. The business of the legislator, whether human or divine, is with mankind as they are; and while he adapts his institutions to their defects, so as to avoid making them impracticable or mischievous, he should also shape them to elevate and reform as far as possible. The legislator, therefore, in devising a frame of society, should adapt it to a state in which the rich are selfish and the poor indolent and improvident. For, after all that has been boasted of human improvement, this is usually man's condition. Now, in adjusting social institutions, it is all-important to secure physical comfort; because in a state of physical misery and degradation, moral and intellectual improvement are hopeless; and the business of the legislator is more especially to take care of the weak: the strong will take care of themselves. Property is the chief element of political strength; it is this which gives to individuals power in society; for "money answereth all things;" it commands for its possessor whatever he needs for his physical comfort and safety. The great desideratum in all benign legislation is to sustain the class which has no property, against the social depression and physical suffering to which they always tend. That there will always be such a class, at least till the millennium, is certain, for reasons already stated. Now all civilized communities exhibit a natural law which tends to depress the physical condition of those who have no property, who are, usually, the laboring classes. That law is the tendency of population to increase. The area of a country grows no larger, while the number of people in it is perpetually increasing, unless that tendency is already arrested by extreme physical evils. The same acres have, therefore, more and more mouths to feed, and backs to clothe. Consequently, each person must receive a smaller and smaller share of the total proceeds of the earth. The demand perpetually increases in proportion to the supply; and therefore the price of those productions rises, as compared with the price of labour. Hence in every flourishing community, the relative proportion between the price of land, its rents, and the food and clothing which it produces, on the one hand, and the price of manual labour on the other, is perpetually, though slowly, changing. The former rises, the latter sinks. Improvements in agriculture and the arts, extensive conquests, emigrations, or some other cause, may for a time arrest, or even reverse, this process; but such is the general law, and the constant tendency. The very prosperity and growth of the community work this result. The owners of land become richer: those who live by labour become poorer. Physical depression works moral depression, and these overcrowded and under-fed labourers, becoming more reckless, are familiarized with a lower standard of comfort, and continue to increase. This law has wrought in every growing nation on the globe which is without domestic slavery. It is felt in Great Britain, in spite of her vast colonies, where she has disgorged her superfluous mouths and hands, to occupy and feed them on virgin soils: in spite of her conquests, which have centred in her lap the wealth of continents. It has begun to work in the Northern States of America, notwithstanding the development of the arts, and the proximity of the Great West. Every where it reduces the quantity or quality of food and raiment which a day's labour will earn, and perpetually tends to approximate that lowest grade at which the labouring classes can vegetate, multiply, and toil.
What, now, is the remedy? Not agrarianism: this could only aggravate the evil by taking away the incentive to effort, in making its rewards insecure. Not conquest of new territory: the world is now all occupied; and conquest from our neighbours is unjust. We found the remedy in the much-abused institution of domestic slavery. It simply ended this natural, this universal strife between capital and labour, by making labour the property of capital, and thus investing it with an unfailing claim upon its fair share in the joint products of the two. The manner in which slavery effects this is plain. Where labour is free, competition reduces its price to whatever grade the laws of trade may fix; for labour is then a mere commodity in the market, unprotected, and subject to all the laws of demand and supply. The owner of land or capital pays for the labour he needs, in the shape of wages, just the price fixed by the relation of supply and demand; and if that price implies the severest privation for the labourer or his family, it is no concern of his. Should they perish by the inadequacy of the remuneration, it is not his loss: he has but to hire others from the anxious and competing multitude. Moreover, the ties of compassion and charity are vastly weaker than under our system; for that suffering labourer and his family are no more to that capitalist, than any other among the sons of want. But when we make the labour the property of the same persons to whom the land and capital belong, self-interest inevitably impels them to share with the labourer liberally enough to preserve his life and efficiency, because the labour is also, in the language of Moses, "their money," and if it suffers, they are the losers. By this arrangement also, a special tie and bond of sympathy are established between the capitalist and his labourers. They are members of his family. They not only work, but live, on his premises. A disregard of their wants and destitution is ten-fold more glaring, more difficult to perpetrate, and more promptly avenged by his own conscience and public opinion. The bond of domestic affection ensures to the labourer a comfortable share of the fruits of that capital which his labour fecundates. And the law is enabled to make the employer directly responsible for the welfare of the employed. Thus, by this simple and potent expedient, slavery solved the difficulty, and answered the question raised by the gloomy speculations of Malthus, at whom all anti-slavery philosophers have only been able to rail, while equally impotent to overthrow his premises, or to arrest the evils he predicts.
Slavery also presented us with a simple and perfectly efficient preventive of pauperism. The law, public opinion, and natural affection, all joined in compelling each master to support his own sick and superannuated. And the elevation of the free white labourers, which results from slavery, by placing another labouring class below them, by assigning to them higher and more remunerative kinds of labour, and by diffusing a more general prosperity, reduced white pauperism to the smallest possible amount amongst us. In a Virginian slaveholding county, the financial burden of white pauperism was almost inappreciable. Thus, at one touch, our system solved happily, mercifully, justly, the Gordian knot of pauperism, a subject which has completely baffled British wisdom.
The attempt may be made to evade these considerations, by saying that the same law of increase in population will at length operate, in spite of slavery; and that its depressing effects will reveal themselves in this form: that the labouring class will become so numerous, the same alteration between demand and supply of labour will appear, and the slave's labour will be worth no more than his maintenance, when he will cease to sell for any thing. At this stage, it may be urged, self-interest will surely prompt emancipation, and the whole slave system will fall before the evil which it was expected to counteract.
To this there are several answers. The argument implies that the slaves will be, at that stage, relatively very numerous. Then, the political difficulties of emancipation would be proportionably great. The political necessity would overrule the economical tendency, and compel the continuance of the beneficent institution. And while it subsisted, the tie of domestic affection, and the force of law and public opinion, would still secure for slaves a better share in the joint profits of labour and capital, than would be granted to depressed free labour. This was the case in the Roman Empire, where the population of Italy and Sicily was for several centuries as dense as in those modern States where the Malthusian law has worked most deplorably: and yet slavery did not yield, and emancipation did not follow.
But the more complete answer is as follows. We will attempt now to point out an influence which enabled domestic slavery to resist and repair the evils of over-population, vastly better than any other form of labour. As population increases, the size of fortunes which are accumulated increases. Instances of accumulation are more numerous and far more excessive. Density of population, facility of large industrial operations, concentration of number of labourers, with other causes, ensure that rich men will be vastly richer than while population was sparse; and that there will be many more rich men. While a few of these will be misers, as a general rule they will seek to expend their overflowing incomes. But as man's real wants lie within very narrow limits, and the actual necessaries and comforts of life are cheap, the larger part of these overgrown incomes must be spent in superfluities. The money of the many excessively rich men is profusely spent in expensive jewelry, clothing, equipage, ostentatious architecture, useless menials, fine arts, and a thousand similar luxuries. Now the production of all these superfluities absorbs a vast amount of the national labour, and thus diminishes greatly the production of those values which satisfy real wants. A multitude of the labourers are seduced from the production of those more essential values, by the higher prices which luxury and pride are enabled to pay for their objects. Now, although the manufacturers of these superfluities may, individually, secure a better livelihood than those laborers who produce the necessaries of life, yet the result of the withdrawal of so many producing hands is, that the total amount of necessaries produced in the nation is much smaller. There is, then, a less mass of the necessaries of life to divide among the whole number of the citizens; and some people must draw a smaller share from the common stock. Every sensible man knows that these will be the landless, labouring men. The wealth of the rich will, of course, enable them to engross a liberal supply for their own wants, however scant may be that left for the poor. The ability to expend in superfluities is, therefore, a misdirection of just so much of the productive labour of the country, from the creation of essential values, to the producing of that which fills no hungry stomach, clothes no naked back, and relieves no actual, bodily want. And here, after all, is the chief cause why the Malthusian law is found a true and efficient one in civilized communities. For, were the increasing labour of a growing nation wisely and beneficiently directed to draw from the soil and from nature all that they can be made to yield, their fecundity would be found to be practically so unlimited, that the means of existence would keep pace with the increase of population, to almost any extent. The operative cause of the growing depression of the poor is, not that the same acres are compelled to feed more mouths, and clothe more backs, so much as this: that the inducements which excessive wealth gives to the production of superfluities, misdirects so much precious labour, that the fruitfulness of those acres is not made to increase with the increase of mouths. This is proved by the simple fact, that in all the old countries the misery of the lowest classes tends to keep pace with the luxury of the highest. It is proved emphatically by the industrial condition of Great Britain. There is no country in which production is so active; none in which agriculture and the arts are more stimulated by science and intelligence; and yet there is a growing mass of destitution, yearly approaching more frightful dimensions, and testing the endurance of human nature by lower grades of physical discomfort. The reason is not to be sought in her limited territory or crowded population; for if the British Islands have not acres enough to grow their own bread for so many, why is it that so productive a people are not able to pay for abundance of imported bread? It is to be found in the existence of their vast incomes, and the excessive luxury practised by the numerous rich. True, these magnates excuse their vast expenditures in superfluities by the plea, that one of the motives is the "encouragement of industry." But they effect, as we have seen, not an encouragement, but a misdirection of industry. The reason why so many British poor have a scanty share of physical comforts is, that there are so many British rich men who, by their lavish expenditure, tempt and seduce so large a multitude of producing hands from the creation of actual comforts to the creation of superfluities.
What safe remedy can the legislator propose for this evil? Not a violent, agrarian leveling of the larger estates. That, as we have shown, would be wicked and foolish. Nor can it be found in sumptuary laws. The world has tried them to its heart's content, and found them impracticable. It is true, that their adoption showed how clear a perception the ancients had of one truth, which modern political science pretends to ignore. That truth is, that luxury is a social evil. We have shown that it is as wasteful of social wealth as it is of morals. The ancients thought thus, and they were right. Legislators now-a-days, in exploding their remedy as no remedy, seem to desire to cheat themselves into the belief that the disease is no disease. But the ancients were not as stupid as men imagine.
Now, we do not boast that we can offer a perfect remedy. But our system of labour certainly gave us a partial one of inestimable value. Where the rich man is a citizen of a hireling State, his accumulated wealth and profuse income are all spent in superfluities, except the small portion needed for the comforts of life for his own family. But when he is a citizen of a slave State, they are first taxed with the comfortable support of his slaves. The law, public opinion, affection for them, and self-interest, all compel him to make the first appropriation out of that profuse income, to feeding and clothing his slaves, before he proceeds to superfluities. Thus, the proceeds of the accumulations which dense population and social prosperity cause, are rescued from a useless and mischievous expenditure in those luxuries, the purchase of which misdirects public industry, and tempts to a deficient production of the necessaries of life; and are directed where benevolence, mercy, and the public good indicate, to the comfortable maintenance of the labouring people. That this is the effect of domestic slavery on the incomes of the rich, is proved by one familiar fact. It is well known at the South how slaveholders usually murmured when comparing their style of living with that of capitalists in the hireling States of equal nominal wealth. The planter who owned fifty thousand dollars worth of fertile lands, and a hundred slaves, while he lived in far more substantial comfort and plenty, displayed in Virginia far less ostentation and luxury than the merchant or manufacturer of the North who owns the same amount of capital. His house was plainly furnished with the old-fashioned goods of his fathers; his family rode in a plain carriage, drawn by a pair of stout nags which, probably, either did a fair share of ploughing also, or drew a large part of the fuel for the household. He himself was dressed partly in "jeans," woven under the superintendence of his wife; and his boys were at school in a log house, with homespun clothing, and, in summer, bare feet. It was not unusual to hear the slaveholder, when he considered this contrast, complain of slavery as a bad institution for the master. But this was its merciful feature, that it in some measure arrested superfluous luxury, and taxed superfluous income with the more comfortable support of the labourers. In a hireling State, these might be left half-starved on the inadequate compensation which the hard law of supply and demand in the labour-market would compel them to accept, while the capitalist was rioting in a mischievous waste of the overgrown profits of his capital.