PERFORATIONS IN TIIHE "gatter-DaQ XpamphlletH,, BY ONE OF THE "'EIGHTEEN MILLIONS OF BORES. EDITED BY ELIZUR WRIG HI T. No. I. UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE. CAP ITAL PUNISH M ENT. —SLAVERY B OSTO N: PHILLIPS, SAMPSON, AND COMPANY, 110 WASHINGTON STREET. 1850. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1850, by PHILLIPS, SAMPSON, & COMPANY, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts..right Hailsty, Printers, 3 Water st. PERFORATIONS. THOMAS CARLYLE has long been known as a " sublime grumbler " at shams in Church and State, and as such has been regarded with no small favor and affection by some wise and good men of our hemisphere. Bad systems have to be grumbled at-such is the law of Nature-before they can take leave of us, and the man may be truly precious who can bring them,into contempt, even though gifted with no constructive wisdom to propose better. It is on this pedestal only that the fame of Carlyle will stand, if haply he does not succeed in oversetting it by his new career. Carlyle has always been a writer of the most provoking generality. He shoots his lightnings out of clouds and darkness, throwing a broad glare upon things in general, and nothing in particular. You read him to the end with a ravenous appetite, and rise from the feast with an unaccountable sense of emptiness. You love to hear him thunder against idiot dynasties, and pursy priesthoods; you admire his heroes, such as are not seen alive, and probably never were; but when you come to ask for an application of all this sublime wisdom to tangible, present, every-day realities, all you 4 PERFORATIONS IN THE get is a sneer at you, as a vulgar beaver, or an incompetent numbskull. In vain have men questioned him as to what he would put instead of the trash he has been sweeping into the dust hole. " The government and priesthood of true, wise and heroic men," he replies, sticking to his generality. " But who are they? " c" That is your look out; you must find and elect them or perish." "But who are we? And how shall we elect them 2 " These last questions, pushed for a decade or two, have at last pushed poor Carlyle quite beyond his depth, and, mere general thunderer and universal scold as he is, without an average share of that " beaver intellect " of which he speaks so lightly, he has been forced to attempt in his Latter-Day Pamphlets some sort of answer. And his answer is quite remarkable. What idiot dynasties or pursy priesthoods may think or say of it, heaven only knows. Whether they will think it, all things considered, worth a flagon of their wine, or a service of plate, or the precious crumbs under their tables is not for us to imagine. It is a point for their own profound wisdom to decide. The case reminds me of a humble canine friend of mine, who once upon a time snapped up a bit of meat which had fallen on the coals, swallowing it together with some of the hot embers. He could not be got to repeat the enterprise. To epitomize this notable answer of Carlyle in his own sort of English, it is this: " Do you ask, 0 my incompetent friends,'Who are we? and how are we to elect divine heroes, and true priests to govern and teach us' To be frank with :A LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS." 5 you, you are nothing else than some twenty-seven millions of fools, with a few exceptional scoundrels, and the divine heroes and true priests —Heaven only knows who and where they are-must elect themselves. You.. N are only bound in your incompetence to receive and own them. They are bound, on their own eternal peril, to elect themselves-not get themselves elected by universal suffrage, sham or otherwise. They are Godappointed to hang the scoundrels and regiment all the rest of you into industrial and other regiments in which you shall work or be shot; and the sooner they set about it the better. You elect rulers, indeed! Shall folly have the wisdom to get itself wisely governed? Shall evil correct itself, or water run up hill, or a man lift himself by his own waistbands z " 0 profound Carlyle, nothing is easier for an abstract philosopher than to ride into chaos or any other insane asylum on a figure of speech. You will find the figure called assumption always ready for the saddle, and, though clearly belonging to the ass tribe, it will put you a mile beyond common sense in less than three minutes. Assuming that a majority of any nation are born-fools, with exceptional scoundrels, universal suffrage of course becomes folly. A very foolish person could see that. What is due to Thomas Carlyle for making such an assumption, or in other words for setting up a most God-dishonoring lie as a " God's truth," he, as general thunderer and universal scold, by trade, against shams and lies-in the abstract-does abundantly and in many places declare. "The un 6 PERFORATIONS IN THE happy creature," he says in one place, "' does he not know then, that every lie is accursed, and the parent of more curses? " Yes, Carlyle knows that, in the general, as who does not 3 But where is the fruit of his knowing it? Practically, he slanders his Maker. He professes the most profound admiration and respect for Nature, and then abuses the divinest end of it, human Nature. The mass of his countrymen, and a fortiori the rest of the world, he pronounces " fools," that is,' failures, miserablest of abortions! Is this so? In the length and breadth of beautiful flowery Englandthinking, doing, merry England-is misery the rule, and happiness the exception? 0 God! if this is a hell, where is heaven? In spite of beer, brandy and brutality, there do go up from that ancient classic land a hum of contented industry and a hymn of domestic endearment, a laugh of social pleasure and a shout of joyful achievement, in harmony which is wonderfully little disturbed by wails of oppression, want, violence and vice, after all. And yet even Carlyle does not pretend that England, since Cromwell, has been remarkably well governed. Indeed, if I may interpret him, no few of its rulers have been scoundrels who deserved to be hung. Yet the millions have had the wisdom to be thus happy. Are they fools? If governments are so potent as Carlyle would have us believe, for good or for ill, surely it must require no small wisdom in the masses to get along so comfortably with a bad government. Carlyle's whole cloud-sketched theory of government CC LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS." 7 rests on a tissue of false assumptions. He assumes as the ground work of his'lofty grumbling that the world is far worse governed now than it once was, and that this deterioration is in the line of democratic tendencies. He assumes that government is almost the one thing needful to a nation, and decisive of its destiny. He assumes that it is the ruin of a government not to call every wise man to its aid-there being a scarcity of wisdom for governmental purposes in every country. On these bat-eyed assumptions, he calls upon the wise and heroic to usurp the reins of absolute power, and govern a foolish world with a rod of iron, as a matter of mercy! This is the restoration of a very antiquated theory, with all its grotesque absurdities freshly carved. Let us examine some of these fundamental assumptions. Is the world so much worse governed now than formerly? It is readily admitted that the governments of the world are all bad enough, and that many of them are rapidly becoming too bad to be borne. But this may arise as well from the advancement of the people as from the retrogradation of the governments. The present governments of Austria and Russia might have been very paternal and progressive for some of the ages. Louis Philippe may have been a great improvement on Croesus. Horrible enough are the Connemaras and the Austrian butcheries and flagellations, but unfortunately starvation is not a modern novelty in Ireland, and there were slaughters in Europe long before vulgar universal suffrage had troubled delicate people. 8 PERFORATIONS IN THE The kind and quality of government is undoubtedly one of the causes which operate on human society to modify it for better or worse. It has always been so, though it is growing less and less so. But Carlyle immensely overrates the importance of government, technically so called, and underrates that natural selfregency which resides in the mass itself. Napoleon's absorption of France into himself was not an original joke, nor is Carlyle's hero-worship any new religion. Prophets and historians, less extravagant than Carlyle, have had the trick since time began of looking at the monarch or the dynasty, or the name, as the nation; and through their deceptive writings we always see governments and dynasties, and their fights and feuds, excessively magnified or distorted beyond their due relative importance. Indeed we see in history but little else. The real history of the race is hidden behind that of ambitious usurpers of government, or rather it is totally lost for want of historians. We know something of Pharaoh, and Nebuchadnezzar, and Alexander, and Hiero and his wonderful servant Archimedes; but what do we know of the Egyptian farmer, or the Assyrian market-man, or the ancient Sicilian peasant The exceptional men have been written, but we find not the representative men, the samples of the mass. So we learn from history about as much of ancient human life as we should now learn of actual European life by visiting a dozen courts in all of which we should find French spoken, and costume, morals and manners, all cut to the Paris pattern. I beg leave humbly to "C LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS. 9 doubt whether the historical rise and fall of potentates and empires, the development and decadence of ancient civilizations, and the eruptions and irruptions of barbarians, really ever had much significance to the human race at large. I humbly doubt, for example, whether the dispersion of the Jews and their condemnation to the " Old Clo" lyrics throughout the cities of Christendomn was ever any considerable calamity out of a narrow circle of chief priests, scribes and pharisees. Pyramids have ceased to grow in the valley of the Nile, but corn has not, and possibly the latter may be more justly distributed among the mouths,than when the Pyramids were more flourishing. The historical glory of a people may be one thing, and their solid comfort quite another. Again I more than doubt whether any very great proportion of the wisdom of a country ever was, ever will be, or ever need be, consumed in managing the machinery of government, technically so called.Doubtless every particle of wisdom tells on the welfare and destiny of a country, but there are a multitude of positions, even very private ones, where it may do so more effectually than if it did so officially. Carlyle seems to think that government must seek out wisdom, and feed it with official pap, or it is lost! Is wisdom a parasite in nature, or a plant that must be delicately nursed and potted, or it will turn into a weed and cumber the ground? A doctrine more disgusting and insuilting to all men with souls was never propounded. Governments, so called, have been the death of no 10 PERFORATIONS IN THE little wisdom. They have used up in the governing of to-day, what might have governed for ages. Carlyle has the vulgarity to regret that Robert Burns was not so used up. He thinks it would have been of inestimable service to England if William Pitt had called Burns into his cabinet, instead of leaving him to," gauge ale, and be thankful; pouring his celestial sunlight through Scottish Song-Writing-the narrowest chink ever offered to a Thunder-God before." Not so very narrow a chink, though. I should like to know what regal or vice regal Solomon ever rayed so much celestial wisdom from the chinks of a palace. Pitt did mischief enough to England by running her in debt: I am sincerely thankful he did not add the more enormous rascality of robbing her and the world of a Burns. With high veneration for the wisdom, wit and heroism of Burns, I have no faith that he would have glorified either of the three in a Downing Street secretaryship. The-only good any man could then have done England, in that capacity, was to have thundered in her ears, and engraved on her memory with the point of a red-hot crow-bar, the eternal moneywisdom, PAY AS YOU GO! Would Burns, the uncalculating, who allowed himself to run in debt Io the future for wit and pleasure through the wine-cup, have done that? No, no; the sort of wisdom that Pitt wanted was that of one Ben. Franklin, a Boston printer boy, who could dine on a crust and water, experiment on lightning, and keep account~. Carlyle not only mistakes human nature itself, but " LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS.' 11 he overlooks the very conditions of the grand problem of human society. Those conditions have so changed within 400 years that the whole anterior history of the race is made indecisive, if not valueless. Possibly what he says of universal suffrage might have been wisely said while nine-tenths of the race were of necessity machines, mere beasts of burden, whether bond or free. Up to 400 years ago there was nothing on which a civilization could rest except human slavery, under one name or another. In that day of the world's infancythis is only its childhood-it knew not its right hand from its left. It knew neither the circulation of the blood nor the pressure of the atmosphere. It could entertain no astronomical theory more probable than that the moon is green cheese, the sun a broad red-hot toasting iron, and the earth a pan-cake. It neither yoked fire and water, nor harnessed the lightning. It had no cotton factories, nor steam horses, nor even gunpowder. And, above all tliings, it had no newspapers or printing presses. Now, given at the egress from Noah's ark, if such egress there ever were, the arts and sciences as they are in 1850, would the history of the last 4,000 years be such as we ind it Would there have been Babel and the Pyramids, and the Pharaohs, and Solomron, and Nebuchadnezzar, and Xerxes, and Alexander, and that beauty, Caligula, and that long dynasty of still greater Christian beauties, breathing at this our day out of its element in the unfortunate Pio Nono? Good heavens! No. Wooden brains might know better. Well, then, if the presence of these conditions, over 12 PERFORATIONS IN THE looked by Carlyle, would have made all history totally different from what it is, just about the reverse every way of what it is, where is the wisdom of appealing to history as to the expediency 6f any governmental measure, universal suffrage for example, for the new conditions. Where is the wisdom of condemning such measures as the new conditions seem to require, because they do not perfectly fit that transition from the old to the new which is now in.progress? A parcel of Reverend grannies, seeing every thing unsettled under the advent of the new conditions, sigh for the iron or leaden peace of the past, that old Paradise-Lost of the monarchies and hierarchies. But their souls cannot be gratified without unyoking the steam and unbridling the lightning, without abolishing types and presses, tumb. ling Copernicus, Newton' and La Place into oblivion, and forgetting the circulation of the blood. Where is the Holy Inquisition? Priestcraft, with a strange presentiment of the advent of the new thought, did its best to strangle the embryo. It dungeoned Galileo. Will it make auto da fes again while there are telegraphs and daily newspapers? Under the reign of newspapers, and the administration of iron horses, the monarchies and hierarchies live by mere sufferance. Kings and queens, or their semblances, exist not by any inherent force or life of their own, but by the composition and resolution of social forces. This, or verging to this, is the state of governments by the necessity of the present and oncoming new conditions. Begging the pardon of Carlyle in his latter days, and all other night-cap philosophers, "; LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS.7" 13 Universal Suffrage is not a question which awaits their or any body's decision. It is a necessity of certain conditions. Granted newspapers, and the substitution of levers, screws, wheels and axles, for human bones and muscles, universal suffrage follows' in fact, however ybu may vail it in form. It follows as inevitably and irresistibly as a stone obeys gravitation. It is easy enough to see how a William the Conqueror, holding all the news of the realm in his own couriers and retainers, the millions being as ignorant of his plans and powers as of Hebrew, could get his beautiful -" Domesday Book " of British Landocracy, which pleases our latter day philosopher so much, written according to his own sovereign pleasure in four years. But suppose his birth had been reserved for this century, and he had conquered England as it is in 1850, at the head of' any amount you please of loafers with bayonets-and it would have required a rather larger amount than of yore, I think-and, his sovereignty being established, and old deeds, mortgages and evidences of debt, national and individual. being cleanly constumed as fuel to cook the coronation feast, let us suppose that William the Conqueror sits down to dictate the 1"Domesday Book " to his excellent secretaries. He does it of his own sovereign pleasure in form, but what will that sovereign pleasure be in fact? With the lightning glances of twenty seven, or say even twenty, million pairs of intelligent British eyes on him, belonging in some nillions of cases to heads that have absorbed land-reform notions from the newspapers, would he deed all 14 PERFORATIONS IN THE England to the captains of his loafer army? Certainly not; with his sound sense, or even Norman cunning, it could not be his sovereign pleasure to commit such folly. It might do to make villeins of those old blockhead Saxons; uninformed as they were, it was possible to make little else of them. Universal suffrage or popular will could do nothing, for on the subject of this said Domesday Book it did not exist. There was nothing then possible but a change of lords and masters. But steam and the newspapers, spinning jennies and power looms, have changed all this. Suffrage, will, wish as to land legislation, if not universal and co-extensive with the human population, yet immensely general, does now exist, and in connection with a very formidable power, and it is an element of society which no autocrat or usurper, no William the Conqueror, Kaiser, Nicholas or Napoleon, now conquering England, if that be supposable, can, if he would, neglect. If not universal suffrage, the suffrage of universal newspaperdom doth have its will. Your conquering William must, within an infinitesimal frfction, submit to do its will as much as if chosen by it. All that holds the suffrage of England at this moment from sweeping the national debt and domesday deeds into a great bonfire of tar-barrels, is conscience and beer. But for the stupidity of those whom beer yet keeps in the condition of machinery, and the manly patience and conservatism of those whom knowledge has emancipated, all England would be tumbled into a heap to be reconstructed from the foundation. I undertake to say that how much so ever the lord-grandames of Great Britain temporal or " LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS." 15 spiritual, may despise democracy and deprecate universal suffrage, Great Britain is and has for years been governed very much as it would have been if every election had been formally decided by the ballot-box and unrestricted suffrage. The Corn Laws would have stepped out of the Statute Book a few years sooner if the masses could have represented themselves directly in Parliament, but represented they have been; and the Corn Laws have budged. To talk of getting on in government without universal suffrage, in a country where civilization embraces the people and a free press, is to drivel and spit against the hurricane. Neither despotism nor heroism, nor any other individual isnz can be any thing more than a humble servant of the popular will-so far as such a will exists-doing according to its ability and understanding what it hopes will suit said will-all things considered. The wise men of England-its Sir Robert Peels,* if they really are wise-will ere long see that to accord universal suffrage in form is not a subversive but a conservative measure. It will precipitate no considerable reform or deform, but only stop a vast amount of Chartist and such like grumbling. Doubtless it will gradually make some havoc of the figures on the civil list, and stop ancient and sacred rat-holes in the Treasury Department, but the public credit will stand the more stably, and the day of the blind British Sampson's bowing himself between the pillars of the National Debt will be postponed. * This tract was in,the hands of the printers before the death of Sir Robert-which accounts for its other antiquities. EDITOR. 16 PERFORATIONS IN THE Universal suffrage, say you, Carlyle, is unwise, capricious, blind, no better than throwing an orange peel out of a club-house window in " Pell Mell," and making the man premier whom it hits 3 Be it so. It is no worse than the fix in which constitutional monarchy now finds itself. Aristocracy, in any present possible shape of it, is no better than fortuitous, not to say fatuitous. But the truth is otherwise. Universal suffrage, though it does not, and from the nature of things cannot, select from the universal people its candidate for chief magistracy, and therefore cannot select the best and wisest, will nevertheless have the next best possible chance for the wisest. A candidate gets selected in one of two ways. Either some ambitious partizan casts about him for the man who will best suit his party, and secure to that party from the other the majority of the suffrage, and is lucky enough to hit on one who is more acceptable than others to his fellow wire-pullers, and so gets him nominated by his party, or he suggests himself and gets nominated. From the two or three so selected, universal suffrage chooses one, and that is all the choice it has. Some lucky politician by trade chooses whom he thinks best out of about half the people-choosing himself if he dares-and merely runs one chance in two of a veto from universal suffrage. That is all, and a very absurd thing it looks to be, but it is actually the best thing possible, both for the extremes and the means of society, under the present conditions. And of all things it ought to suit our granitic friend Carlyle, for it is altogether the most favorable arrangement for his " LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS" 17 " born king " wherewithal to accomplish his destiny. He being manifestly born to rule, a man of that practical wisdom which makes itself everywhere felt, has only to select his party wisely and become naturally its trump card, and of course successful. Party, under universal suffrage, is the open road to power to all who, having the ability, have also the will to govern. And if the "' born king" will not take this road, whose fault is it? And if he has not the will to govern, is not that itself proof that he lacks one prime element of ability, and that universal suffrage makes no mistake, after all, in neglecting him? This election by party caucus, under the limited veto of universal suffrage, has this grand advantage over election by "orange peel," or, what is equally fortuitous, hereditary descent; it is the best guess of some man who has carefully studied the people as to the individual whose administration of public affairs they will be best pleased to acquiesce in. And the mere ceremony of his election by universal suffrage, if it be no more, has a vast influence in aiding and making the most out of whatever ability to govern he may possess. Given two governors of precisely equal abilities and virtues, one appointed by himself, his ancestors, or a foreign power, and the other by the people, incompetent brethren and even " scoundrels" included, to say which will govern best. Can any fool fail to solve the problem correctly? Which will have most human nature to aid him? Universal suffrage can well afford to get along with 18 PERFORATIONS IN THE half the talent and wisdom required to govern with no suffrage or a very limited one. Its work is more than half done to begin with. I am well aware, and sorrowfully admit, that universal suffrage in a country like ours, which is in fact just now a slavocracy, rather than a democracy, will be obliged to put up with candidates who are particularly acceptable to the worst passions and worst classes of the people. It was a little while since not very improbable, and it is still not impossible, that we may have for our next President Gen. Lopez, if he does not lack the constitutional qualifications, buccaneer and butcher as he is; that is to say, if the present clouds over his horizon should break away into the sunshine of a war with Spain. If he succeeds in accomplishing the work which heaven still has for pirates and buccaneers, he may be our great model man, and as good a man as we deserve, I am very sorry to say. But the comfort is, that it is a great mistake to suppose that a chief magistrate,.under the present conditions of society, can, by virtue of his chief magistracy, exercise the greatest influence over, or in other words govern the country. No, that is a very different thing. The government or guidance of the country comes from a force which is compounded of all the folly, nonsense, wit, wisdom and actual thinking, which gets itself published either in act ot talk. — Not a particle of such governing power is lost, and a vast quantity of it will even govern if need be through President Lopez, bficcaneer and blockhead tlhough he be. The safety of universal suffrage, with its two par A' LATTER, DAY PAMPHLETS." 19 ties eternally and everywhere watching to steal each the other's wisdom and thunder, is quite charming. The most vital and fundamental fact that can now enter into political speculations is, that society is in a TRANSITION STATE, under the force of new conditions. In the light of this fact, if we see half the population of the most civilized country on earth starved to death, we are not to despair, but rather to hope. Among these conditions there is a new cause of starvation-the laborsaving reign of machinery, substituting in a great measure the force of the elements and artificial organizations for the force of the millions and their natural bones and muscles. The millions, that is to say perhaps two or three millions out of every twenty, not being in a condition to be so liberated, being shut out from the prime source of food, the land, by the double barrier of land-monopoly and their ignorance of agriculture, must starve unless there be a repeal of the sweat-law given to Adam. And this cause of starvation is only partially developed, is rapidly developing. The capacities of steam are not yet exhausted, nor the combinations of the mechanical powers, nor the applications of wind, water and gravitation; much less those of magnetism or magnetic electricity, whose mighty tides, sweeping from the equator to the poles, and back with every diurnal revolution, are just beginning dimly to be discerned. Whether Mr. Paine succeed or not in emancipating the coal mines, there can be no doubt that as science attains a higher degree of perfection, it will more and more control nature and subject it to the desires of man. More and more the 20 PERFORATIONS IN THE rude masses of human machines must be emancipatedinto starvation, unless there be a corresponding development of social science to prevent it. But Mr. Carlyle ought to see some hope, more than he does, of this. On his own favorite and controlling assumnption that the welfare of the race depends upon each nation getting itself governed by a real king, some Cromwell or a better, he ought to see that under the new conditions the race has the better chance. One of these new conditions is the PRESS. Grant it to be open to a flood of folly, it is also the channel of wisdom. It is the medium of all divine revelations of any extent. When the press was but in embryo, when it was a mere style, sharp stick or goose quill in the hand of the scribe, operating on brass plate, parchment or papyrus, was there not as great a chance that some blackguard, ruffian or blockhead would come to rule, as that a wise man would? How could wisdom make itself known to the inward thoughts of men, and get itself accepted, any more than a voice be heard in a planet without an atmosphere? The movable types and the platten that can impress half a million of them at once on paper are an atmosphere for the voice of wisdom. Folly may fill it with brute noises; but all sonorous vibrations tend to harmony, and folly is no match for wisdom. The chance of a wise man, born any where into the planet, coming virtually to govern mankind and give them the benefit of his wisdom, is a thousand to one, under the art of printing. Even now, with our lame Cadmian alphabets, puzzling, absurd hieroglyphics, that have to be spelled out accord (c LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS." 21 ing to no reason, or law, or fitness, and requiring a separate priesthood of schoolmasters to initiate us all, at considerable expense, into the horn-book mysteries, printing establishes a sort of omniscience in the race. What then will it do when a reasonable phonetic alphabet shall make reading coextensive with speaking, and nullify the very laws which taboo the alphabet from the negro slave. Let us suppose now that human salvation, in a public sense, lies in getting back to monarchy in form, which, bating the trappings, is what we understand Carlyle to desire and commend as the only sure road to that all important end with him, governnient, is not the chance of getting a Cromwell, and not a Caligula, greatly enhanced by printing? To me it seems so much so as to make all croakings and jeremiads, and sighing for the flesh-pots of Old Noll, out of place and ridiculous. Far better than that. Under universal reading, a king in form, an expensive sceptered nonentity or pestilence-royal log or royal storkbecomes impossible. Stump oratory ceases to be much, though it may go on by instinct. Universal frogdom lhas betaken itself to a species of dumb oratory, silent croaking, and inaudible, only visible, clamor-a new voice of stillness, which, like God Almighty's, is the very chosen element of wisdom, not storming the soul or setting its passions in mutiny, but calmly taking it in its solitude, knocking, entering, and talking with it. In the age to which we are inevitably, by this condition, passing, even the untitled, obscure author of a " LatterDay Pamphlet," provided he introduces to the world a 22 PERFORATIONS IN THE living, unadulterated truth, shall govern it more effectually than ever did autocrat or Kaiser. When the foregoing was on paper, there came to me the Latter Day Pamphlet, No. VI., on " Parliaments." Here is the same hoarse raven note again, the same insane complacency in the harsh and savage features of the past, and the same contempt for all practical mollification and faith in the masses. But there is a pretty substantial acknowledgment of the force of some of the conditions which are new creating the world, and rendering the resurrection of the past impossible. Carlyle comes so near a solution of the great problem of society, that it is wonderful how he can avoid it. He sees that Parliament can no more be what it once was, because its business of stating grievances and discussing remedies, for one thing, is taken out of its hands by the press. Parliament, in all its parleying powers, sinks to a mere sub-editorship of the morning newspaper, and is so busy at that as almost to forego its own peculiar power of voting. The rule now being, " The tools to him who can use them," and Parliament having in the main but a second best fitness for the editing tools, even with reporters to trim and polish, Carlyle sees little use and little hope in Parliaments. And who will much disagree with him? No less pithily than quaintly he says, " So much I take to be fair, or at least unavoidable, in a free country: let every creature try to get his opinion listened to; and let honorable gentlemen, who can print their own stump oratory, and offer the public a reward for using it, by all means do so. But that, " LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS." 23 when no human being will incline or even consent to have their said oratory, they can get upon their legs in Parliament and pour it out still, to the burdening of many newspapers, to the boring of their fellow creatures, and generally to the despair of all thinking citizens in the community: this is and remains, I must crave to say, an infatuation, and, whatever respectable old coat you put upon it, is fast growing a nuisance which must be abated." Very true, but it is a nuisance which will abate itself the moment when, in the natural progress of the reading public, the many come, like prophet Carlyle and some others, to hold such windy literature for what it is worth. He cannot be a very deeply thinking citizen'who despairs at this flood of talk, yet he must be a very shallow one who hopes much from it. God be thanked, there is another quarter from which help is coming. Another cause which has diminished the significance and utility of Parliament, Mr. Carlyle takes to be, that the King is not present in it as of yore. He is now a mere seal, a necessary formality to give authenticity to the expression of the sovereign will of Parliament. But this removal is only a necessary result of the above mentioned condition. Granted a free press, your hereditary kingbecomes a non-entity. He must be off with his traps, to some secluded spot on this or the other side of oblivion. He is no longer a real, but an ideal personage. He can no longer bear the blaze of noonday, as hereditary king, but only as Mr. So-and-So, a man of judgment and active abilities. A Napoleon, able to condense a 24 PERFORATIONS IN TI-IE volume of practical sense into a paragraph or a phrase, and substitute bulletins for books, finds the press an admirable tool wherewithal to work out an imperial function. He can be present in his parliament and abbreviate its talk; he can kick over old fashioned hereditary thrones at his pleasure, and he might endure perhaps to the end of the chapter, doing up the business of governing for the most enlightened community, would he not spurn the throne of veracity also. But Napoleons do not come in continuous lines, either hereditary or elective, which is proof to my mind that heaven has no steady use for them. As the masses by the art of silent talk become more and more knowing, there must be less and less occasion for the condensation of a vast amount of administrative talent in one man. Were you to make a nation by picking half a dozen millions of people out of the central ranks of society, in either Britain or America, in order to get on well with all necessary governmental machinery, what need would there be of higher administrative talent than you could select by lot as you do a grand or petit jury 3 With the omnipresence of the morning newspaper there can be no ordinary royalty, no royalty by virtue of trappings, in any parliament; no head can be endured in it or over it, which has not too much brains to wear any such bauble as a crown. The morning newspaper, and not John Bradshaw, has turned royalty out of parliament. In this sixth pamphlet, too, Carlyle has vouchsafed to concede one little merit to Universal Suffrage. It may be a convenience to his governing man, by way of c" LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS. 7 25 showing him the " instincts " of men, which he concedes are wise and human, while their opinions are of little or no value. He would consult their instincts as he would that of his horse on a question between oats and beans. And moreover he admits that "the multitude, even when its nonsense is not sincere, but produced in great part by beer and stump oratory, will yet by the very act of voting feel itself bound in honor; and so even in that case it apprises you,'Such a man, such a law, will I accept, being persuaded thereto by beer and stump oratory, and having polled at hustings for the same. " This, had I seen it in season, would hlave saved me the trouble of writing what I did on a previous page. It is the very pith of the matter. Even a pretty bad law heartily obeyed is better than a good law set at nought,' despised and trampled on. We can dispense with some wisdom and a great deal of ability in our governor if we feel bound in honor to obey him. Give England Universal Suffrage, and you then have two important advantages, by the showing of Carlyle himself, the rulers are brought to know the:" wise and human " instincts, to say nothing of the opinions, of the people, and tile people themselves feel bound in honor to obey the laws. Is not this a great step in the direction contrary to anarchy? For can any one in his senses suppose that universal suffrage would choose much worse men than are -now in office? What can have become of its " wise and human " instincts, if it do? No, no. Carlyle has here blundered upon the great, everlasting principle of government, the ignorance or neglect of 2 2G PERFORATIONS IN THE which in other places has led him astray. Force, violence, compulsion is but a temporary expedient in government-necessary and unavoidable at times it may be — but all just government, in all parts of God's dominions, relies mainly and almost wholly on the consent of the governed. It is by not giving this great God's fact a place broad enough to stand on in his system that Carlyle has bolted into the wildest error in regard to capital punishment and chattel slavery. So I believe, though I may not be able to make it appear. Carlyle, at least when he is talking of prisons and the gallows, and not of starving Connaughlt and needlewomen, talks of government not as an entity whose business it is to harmonize human society, to establish and maintain order and thus secure to all and sundry the greatest happiness the case will admit. Such a government might undertake to restore the fallen, straighten the crooked, and reform the bad. Such a government might benevolently hang for the sake of example. No, no. With such a view of the business of government, Carlyle frankly confesses that the gallows cannot be justified. In order to get a justification for that blessed and beautiful institution, which the " platform fever," substituted by the injudicious John Howard for the jail fever, is now so rapidly undermining, it is essential to take a sort of theocratic view of human government. We must make it a machine founded upon what Carlyle rather unorthodoxly represents as our divine instincts-including revenge-to administer an orthodox, heaven-and-hell justice in the two opposite directions of rewards and punishments. It must crown heroes and LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS." 27 hang scoundrels, not with any view to the results of either work, not to promote public welfare or defend common rights, but simply and solely because the individuals deserve it, because our gratitude and our revenge so teach us to fulfil the law of God. This exaltation of instinct over reason is a little more tolerable than the sway of the more ancient priestcraft. The theological friends of the gallows in this quarter, it is to be feared, however, will not accept the aid of Carlyle on such conditions. It might injure the foundation of their idolatry. In the mean time, I counsel the AntiHanging Society to publish as a tract Carlyle's argument in favor of the gallows, for the particular benefit of its American theological upholders. Onil this principle of orthodox, theological and Rhadamanthine justice, as Carlyle intimates, it is equally important to reward and punish, and in the view of common sense this fact runs the whole theory at once into the ground. Your tribunal is incompetent. It can only guess at motives, in which all desert either waylies. Of rewards deserved, it can, for want of ability, bestow only one in a nzillion or so. Thousands of the worst transgressors must escape punishment for want of any sure balance in which to weigh their demerits. And as reward and punishment are comparative terms, the inability to reward and punish all according to their deserts, converts into injustice the rewards and punishments which are bestowed on some. Nowhere out of the night-cap of the theological dreamer does any man attribute any such purpose to human government. If the Almighty governs on this plan, as perhaps he does, 28 PERFORATIONS IN THE lie has surely kept the secret to himself. Revenge may be and doubtless is very divine, or at least useful in its proper place. So are some other passions, much superseded and kept out of sight in the best society, though in certain circumstances they might be quite vital to the continuance and preservation of the species. If one may refute a mere appeal to the passions by an appeal to reason, I may say that the gallows itself is a violation of Mr. Carlyle's divine law of revenge. That holy impulse is short lived and dies commonly before the rope maker and the carpenter can intervene. If it has a right to work death on its victim, it must have the right to do so during its own life time. If you may contravene its spirit in one way, why not in another? The law in fact takes the business of punishment out of the hands of revenge and puts it into the bungling hands of a theological abstraction. There is no end to the mischief which government has done proceeding on this principle, and no logical bar to prevent it from returning to gibbets and fagots, for witchcraft and heresy and for a hundred other crimes against theological theories. All that government is competent to do is to maintain a degree of order in society, and secure certain ends of associated power to which individual strength is inadequate. It has and can have no more to do with a man's deserts, as a matter of retributive justice, than it has with the distribution of the nebulosities in infinite space. It can no more go between a man and his Maker, and do any part of the latter's work, than it can meddle with the eternal salvation of the inhabitants of Jupiter. Governing as vicegerent of God, punishing ~4 L&TTER-DAY PAMPHLETS.") 29 and rewarding for inscrutable reasons, has been tried long enough and as a general thing we may say the result of it has been that the innocent have been punished and the guilty rewarded. It is quite time for a new experiment, of governing on a principle within human reach. Let the object be, if you please, to have as little crime as possible. It was found out a good while ago, and is now generally believed, that hanging witches did not circumscribe the agency, real or imaginary, of the devil, and that the ashes of heretics have been the seed of heresy. And it now begins to be believed, not by mere platform philanthropists, but by every day, business, common-sense people, that hanging murderers, however meritorious as a theological demonstration, does not diminish but rather increases the crime of murder. If this be so; if choking men and women with pious solemnity, prayers, hymns, tears and hemp does not at all diminish the frequency of the crime for which they are so choked, but rather the reverse, then government, in our lower and matter of fact view of it, should have nothing to do with any such revolting and degrading human sacrifice. The business does not lie in its line. It is an affair of no benefit, corporeal or spiritual, save to the Doctors of orthodox divinity and the culprits themselves. The State, in our country at least, is not the humble servant of the church, nor bound to go hand and glove with it in any of its transcendental speculations. The theological heaven must stand on its own merits; and the theological hell on its own bottom. Now, so far as any statistics exist, we believe 30 PERFORATIONS IN THE they all go to show that the less any government hangs, the less its subjects will murder. There may not be figures enough toconclude the question in all circumstances, but there surely are enough, supposing we allow them any force at all, to authorize the abolition of the gallows as an experiment, in all favorable circumstances. Let the guilt and the desert of the murderer go, as we let loads and loads of other guilt and desert go, to be settled for at the great day when theology, if it be true, will have its full course and be glorified. Let us bottle up and hermetically seal our private revenge for that day, if we think it worth the expense. In every civilized community we are absolutely obliged to suppress nine tenths of that divine feeling for good and all, and why may we not as well postpone the other one tenth to the day when certain pecuniary claims of the Jews are to be attended to? Surrounding a culprit with pomp and circumstance, saying the churches' most solemn prayers over him, and then vulgarly strangling him with a trap-door and slip-knot, is only exalting the profession of murder and making life cheap with all that morally insane and exceptional class of men who ever feel any temptation to commit murder. Without a joke it is propagating the crime by slips and cuttings. Every skillful and scientific physician of souls will tell you as much. The safety of human life in all ages and all countries has rested and rests on something infinitely stronger than the fear of the gallows, something stronger even than the efficient execution of the wisest human laws, something stronger than the creed and ethics of a church or the fear of its hell, it rests upon the general "~ LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS.)) 31 law which the Creator has impressed upon His human creatures; it rests on the proportion of the milk of human kindness which he shoots through human arteries at every heart-beat; it rests, if it rests any where, on the comparative paucity of scoundrels and maniacs in God's creation. Murder is an exceptional business, an excrescence, and the existence in society of persons capable of committing it is due to a variety of causes more or less remote, not one of which is at all diminished by the most active use of the gallows, nor would one of them be increased by its abolition. Yet the advocates of capital punishment talk as if cutting down the gallows, and resorting to some less revolting form of punishment would do something towards turning humane and honest men into scoundrels, and enhance the premium for life insurance! This is a libel on human nature. As to lawless vagabonds and scoundrels capable of deeds of blood, you no more think of exposing yourself to them with than without a gallows. Putting up at a hotel in a strange state, with a wallet full of bank bills, and suspecting the person who sleeps in the next bed to you, do you slip down stairs and inquire of the landlord if there is a law to hang murderers in that state, and, learning that there is, do you thereupon return to your bed and sleep more quietly than you would have done in ignorance of that fact, or knowing that there was not such a law? The idea is ridiculous. The safety procured by the law is totally inappreciable by any mortal, either in a public or a private point of view. The law is built upon a false theory, the old theological theory 32 PERFORATIONS IN THE of fear and bugbears. Even Carlyle admits we have no right to hang a man as an example, but only out of pure revenge. Hang him as an example and your example is followed too literally. Hate the murderer as we may, if we would diminish murder, we must give up hanging and betake ourselves to a quite different field of labor. We must eradicate the causes which lead to the production of scoundrels, we must in fact apply ourselves to the cultivation of the human soul to such a degree as to exclude homicide generally. In putting an end to ignorance, poverty and starvation, which the new conditions of this age, or rather this new order of ages, render it both imperative on us and possible for us to do, we shall carry this. point of extin.. guishing flagrant crime by the way, and shall find, almost before we know it, that there is a better way of getting rid of a criminal than by slipping him out of the world through a trap door, saying, Begone, 1" Caitiff, I hate thee,"-a way more manly, heroic and Godlike, -a way by which the criminal is got rid of with his own consent and without an exchange of worlds. For a man like Carlyle, or even one a hundred times more dignified and canonical, to take up the character of a male Xantippe, scolding at the Gospel Law of Love as a 9" syllabub of philanthropic twaddle," does not render that law unchristian or even ridiculous. It is still the eternal law of reason and common sense, the universe over. Even Carlyle himself is obliged to confess his brotherhood to the criminal or the scoundrel whom he would hang. But he would have no fellowship with that brother. He would treat him as insane. Very 4 LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS.' 33 good. Who but one still more insane would treat an insane person with the brute violence which is the natural language of hatred? Is there no significant word but hemp that the holy soul can select to convey to the murderer its horror and recoil at his crime? Give us the " philanthropic twaddler," who said, " Neither do 1 condemn thee; go, and sin no more! " This word brother-much abused by cant and hypocrisy though it be-has a very important significance. What a parent may very sensibly do in the way of government, a brother, though an older and a wiser one, may not. Look at it in a family. A wise parent will himself in most cases prefer love and reason as the means of preserving order in a numerous family. But in extraordinary cases it may be at least convenient, if not necessary, to resort to physical force and suffering. Let the older children undertake, as they naturally will, to imitate this example and establish paternal, instead of fraternal command over the younger, and what will be the consequence 3 A miniature pandemonium. The thing is contrary to human nature and won't work. There is no earthly way to establish a fraternal authority except through reason, kindness, and conciliation. The blow of a father's hand may excite a reaction of love, but that of a brother's, never. At the most, it can only hope in time to be forgiven. All that a fraternal government can do in the way of coercion and punishment will amount only to confinement and self-defence, never to vengeance. To this result all civilized and christian governments have practically come, as to crime in general. Murder, strangely enough, to provide 34 PERFORATIONS IN THE for a theological exigency, is excepted. We are forbidden to abolish the gallows, as the penalty of murder, lest hell, the great bank, capital-fund, and armory of the systematic theologies should be undermined and sink into oblivion along with it. It is of no use to point the theologians to God's own mode of dealing with murderers, exemplified in the case of the first. God is professionally of less use to them than Gehenna, and so they accuse Him of having made a mistake, distort a prophecy into a commandment, and nullify the whole spirit of that Gospel which supplanted the rigid code of Moses, made for an iron age. In his veneration of the chattel slavery of the Africans, and his towering contempt for abolitionism, Mr. Carlyle outdoes the late lamented John C. Calhoun. Somehow or other, in his closet there in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, hard by the Thames, he has imbibed a contempt for the negro or ebony-cut man, so intense and transcendental that it would be considered a little extravagant in the patriarchal kingdom of South Carolina. Somehow or other he has got it into his wise and almost prophetic head that. whereas the slave overseer is a successful and thrifty captain of labor, and his negro slave a genuine and effective toiler, the free negro is necessarily the very incarnation of idleness. lie sinks the whole sable style of humanity under this condemnation, without exception or qualification. Meeting a dingy Douglass or a pitchy Ward, who has worked Ilis way from chattlehood up to the side of the ablest of " LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS. 35 white Sanhedrim Doctors and Senators, hero-worshiper as he is reported to be, he is ready to address the runaway in the following contemptuous and profane words. (See MODEL PRISONS, page 25.) " And you Quashee, my pumpkin, —(not a bad fellow either, this poor Quashee, when tolerably guided!)-idle Quashee, I say you must get the Devil sent away from your elbow, my poor dark friend! In this world there will be no existence for you otherwise. No, not as the, brother of your folly will I live beside you. Please to withdraw out of my way if I am not to contradict your folly, and amend it, and put it in the stocks if it will not amend. By the Eternal Maker, it is on that footing alone that you and I can live together!" Now I think that if Thomas Carlyle were to undertake the task of tolerably guiding, by means of the stocks and such like, either Douglass or Ward or some others I wot of, he would indeed find them "some pumpkins." If he did not, he would succeed better than one Thomas Auld and others. But the simple hearted and verdant man has been utterly imposed upon as to facts, by some West Indian overseer or bankrupt slave proprietor, who has taken advantage of his intense antipathy to cant and prejudice against the Exeter Hall platform. Idleness! good God! that is on the other side. Idleness in its most unmitigated form has carried the whip and instilled its own image into the negro at the point of it. This is an education to laziness which the African must have time to recover from. Carlyle is yet to be disabused of a legion of lies, which lazy vagabonds, too lazy to brush their own 36 PERFORATIONS IN THE coats, have poured into his unsophisticated ears. Does Carlyle dare to accuse George Stephen, as true a man as ever opened his eyes to a British sky, of cant and twaddle? Let him read George Stephen's volumes delineating the law and practice of West Indian Slavery, and see what it was that emancipation has ruined. He will there see that slavery was to tile planter nothing but bankruptcy and ruin, revolving in short cycles, while to the slave, to say the least, it was a monstrously awkward mode of producing industry. Though it managed to produce some sugar, it was any thing but sweet to the parties immediately concerned. That emancipation, however foolishly brought about-and the tax payers of England may well enough groan over the ~20,000,000-has increased the idleness of our dark friends, is a most impudent lie. The planters were bound to ruin any how, and no alms or " compensation " could save them. Ruin was periodical and certain with them, their natural inheritance. The indisputable and undeniable fact that the emancipated slaves in Jamaica could do and have done better for themselves, with their own labor on their own land, than they could do working on worn-out sugar estates at any wages and with any domestic accommodations which speculators in such cultivation could or would afford to pay and yield them, is surely one that cannot make against emancipation, except with knaves and swindlers. Quashee, with a Yankee shrewdness which does him infinite credit, has seen fit to c" guide" himself out of the clutches of white sharpers and speculators, et hinc illa lachrymcn -hence this Book of Lamentations. But look again, A LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS.'7 37 O white Christendom, at the genteel vagabonds who pretended that they were God-appointed to wield the many-tailed cat over Quashee, to secure his industry, and keep him in his destined sphere. What did they prophesy as the consequence of their having to give up that sacred symbol of their office? Nothing less than universal riot, havoc, blood and fire. Did a word of it come to pass? No. The rogues knew they lied. Yet they now hold up their heads-with the rich metallic lustre of the cymbal-and impose upon our poor, innocent, philanthropic friend Carlyle as if they had not been caught in the fibs without the fate of Ananias and Sapphira! The British West Indies, once a hell, are no paradise now, but nevertheless-and Quattlebum grieves to know it —emancipation has worked well for the slave, and far better than he deserved for the master. There is, dear Doughface, no rubbing this out, or lying it down, to all eternity. The white race will consult its self-respect and dignity by admitting the fact and governing itselfaccordingly. Even Anglo-Saxondom, with its manifest destiny, will come off second best ill an encounter with this eternal truth. Jamaica is a better and more hopeful island to-day in every human, honest and noble sense of the word-better and richer in the presence of all the gods except Mammon and Belial, than it was on the 31st of July 1834 or any day for 200 years before that. Its chief mourners are no other than the soul of Judas Iscariot and the Editors of our blessed N. Y. Journal of Commercial Christianity, whose grief at empty sugar hogsheads and leaky rum puncheons is to be sure intense and pitiful enough. 38 PERFORATIONS IN THE Well, exclaim our alarmed Southern friends, is this successful experiment to be tried on us? No, not in that form, by any means. It was there effected by the old fashioned political machinery, which Carlyle demlights in, and perhaps you. But it is not to be so done here. Not for want of constitutional power in onr fedral government so to do it, for our constitution is sufficiently arbitrary and potent, but because it belongs not to the genius of our republicanism so to do, and because the new conditions of society are destined of themselves and without the aid of constitutional machinery to sweep away this false institution and much more. Carlyle, talking in another matter, shows so well how impotent are all laws and compromises and wit of statesmen so called, to save such a system from the inevitable tendencies of the Universe, that I must quote a sentence or two, with high approbation, and tremendous applause. Hear, hear! "I must remark to you and reiterate to you that a continued series of votings transacted incessantly for sessions long, with three times three readings, and royal assents as many as you like, cannot make a law the thing which is no law. No, that lies beyond them. They can make it a sheepskin Act of Parliament; and even hang men (though now with difficulty) for not obeying it:-and this they reckon enough; the idle fools! I tell you and them, it is a miserable blunder, this self-styled Claw' of theirs; and I for one will study either to have no concern with it, or else by all judicious methods to disobey said blundering, impious, pretended' law.' In which sad course of condluct, very unpleasant to my feelings, but needful at suchi times, the gods and all good men, and virtually these idle fools themselves, will be on my side; and so I shall "; LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS. 39 succeed at length, in spite of obstacles; and the pretended'law' will take down its gibbet-ropes, and abrogate itself, and march, with the town drum beating in the rear of it, and beadles scourging the back of it, and ignominious idle clamor escorting it, to chaos, one day; and the Prince of Darkness, Father of Delusions, Devil, or whatever his name be, who is and was always its true proprietor, will again hold possession of it,-much good may it do him." This is precisely true of the law of 1793 for the recovery of fugitive slaves, which our great and mighty sages, our Saint Pilates and Saint Herods, are so lovingly putting their poor heartless heads together to re-enact! That condition which humanity as it rises from the brute towards the god runs awayfrom, with an earnestness that disturbs a nation's peace, and a bravery that defies midnight horrors, dogs, devils and distance, must be a false condition and all efforts to legalize, and eternize it must be idle and worse. Lost labor, BMessrs. Clay, Webster, and Cass; your capacious brains with all Princeton and Andover to back you, cannot make a truth of so ugly a lie! or succeed in contradicting the voice of your Maker which cries aloud in these long night-marches by the light of the unchangeable star. Settle it by your soulless bills and judicial array of petty postmasters! Good Heavens! you might as well attempt to unsettle that star by a writ of ejectment or legislate the multiplication table a fiction. The eternal congruity of things cannot unhinge itself at your bidding. If our revered federal constitution as you so learnedly and historically say, requires such a contradiction of God and degradation of man, and has failed 40 PERFORATIONS IN THE to secure obedience, is it very likely that you will succeed? Most happily, it is not. As those distinguished authorities, Snobson, Foxcraft and Toadeater lay it down in the books, passine, "c slavery is a very delicate subject." I shall therefore approach it delicately, coolly and candidly, with a prayerful endeavor not to be fanatical. To approach it otherwise might not now, as once, earn a shower-bath of time-honored eggs or a plumage of terebinthine adhesion, but it would not be sufficiently respectful to the high authorities aforesaid. Slavery, to give all sides fair play, is not so great a sin as it might be. It does not reverse, or nullify all the Creator's laws; water runs down hill and grass grows along with it. Corn ripens, and smiles play on the human face. The brains develope thoughts, and the heart harbors tenderness. The South, after its undisputed sway for a century or two, is not entirely a Sahara, nor a jungle for owls and alligators. It still breeds men and women to glorify God, and powerful politicians to glorify themselves, though with nervous systems considerably out of tune. I am most happy to make these admissions to my Southern brethren, whom I hereby assure that I do not regard them as sinners above all men, and especially my humble and unworthy self. As to original sins and actual transgressions, I could find plenty of them nearer home, for that matter. But as distance has nothing to do with opinions, whatever it may have to do with duties, I shall take leave to express mine, delicately, while I can. The South has suffered some both by the choice of "9 LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS." 41 its laborers and their servitude, and where there is suffering there must have been more or less sin, as a general thing, if my theology be correct. Rude Africans, with all the liberty that the most righteous employers and angelic overseers could have allowed them, would not to this day have made the sunny South the garden that the sturdy Puritans have make of cold and rocky New England. There was an economical transgression in the original selection of such laborers, any how. With such poor qualifications and feeble intentions to civilize and evangelize them as their importers had, it was a sin to bring them into our country. And a still greater sin was it, when once here, to put them in the worst possible relations to become self-directing men. And the perilous height of sin has it been, and is it, when they spontaneously endeavor to rise above that base condition, and assume the control of themselves, to force them back. This is a sin to which the rest sink almost into mereinexpediencies. This is an openwarfare with the Eternal, which cannot come to good. Carlyle deems that slaves are made in heaven. Their collars are marked and padlocked there, and it is presumption for Parliament, Congress or any human legislation to undo the padlock or file off the mark. Indeed, he affirms that it is impossible. But then he tells us that these Heaven-labelled-and-padlocked slaves are everywhere, and even where we least suspect. They invade and pollute the ballot-box, and may now be, for aught we know, in Congress, or they may have just returned from the Nashville Convention. Again, vice versa, some, whom Heaven has labelled FREE, may be 42 PERFORATIONS IN THE hoeing cotton on a peck of corn a week, with hope of salt fish at Christmas. So this discovery of Carlyle, is, after all, not very practical, or consolatory to the slaveholders. They are only troubled to keep in slavery those whom Heaven has manifestly not padlocked. It is for these they deny the alphabet and the Arabic figures, and want a Supreme Court of 17,000 judges and an innumerable legion of bloodhounds, biped and quadruped, wants which Heaven will never supply, whatever Congress may do. As to the sin of holding men, white or black, in slavery, who are willing to be held or care not enough for liberty to make any effort to obtain it, it may discuss itself for all me, and slaves and slaveholders may share it between them at their pleasure. I for one shall never take part in a crusade, moral or physical, to abolish voluntary bondage by any sort of compulsion. Let slavery in the States rest on that foundation as long as it can; not on the want of constitutional power in the general Government to abolish it, for Congress is sovereign in all matters pertaining to national self-preservation and might very justly and constitutionally, in time of peace, abolish it on that ground, if it had the physical power to do it without creating a greater evil,-in time of war, beyond all rational contradiction it would be its duty to do it; nor on a compact, express or implied, between the Slave States and the free, for, aside from the inherent viciousness of such a compact to do wrong, the South as much compacted to abolish slavery long ago, as the North compacted to let it alone till the South abolished it. The South has violated her part of the compact and i LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS.) 43 forfeited her rights under it. But the slaveholders are not contented with our toleration of willing bondage, and non-interference between masters and slaves on the plantations, they demand of us aid to subdue and keep under the yoke unwilling slaves-slaves stamped by heaven as free! They claim a right also to curse with their foul institution the virgin soil of new States. And, if these two things we of the free States do not grant them, they will-what? Visit us with the terrible affliction of their departure, and withdrawal from all political connection with us. They will dissolve this famous and beloved Union and constitute a separate republic, oligarchy, or kingdom, as the case may be. This may be, and perhaps ought to be, terrible to think of. But suppose it the most horrible calamity that ever visited a nation. Can we on two distinct propositions deliberately vote ourselves scoundrels, to escape any calamity? The Hon. Daniel Webster thinks it may be our " disagreeable duty " to do so. * 5 Our author indulges in a tone of censure in regard to Mr. Webster which to some may seem malignant. But I think it proceeds rather from his peculiar view of the authority of slave law than from any want of respect or personal malevolence towards the distinguished Senator. Conceding to that Senator his own interpretation of the Constitution our author probably asks with Lady Constance, " — Since law itself is perfect wrong How can the law forbid my tongue to curse?" For my own part I cannot for a moment concede that our revered Constitution-the bond of Republican Union for the continent-really attempts, or, as a written instrument, means to sanction the crime of re-enslaving —a crime of a deeper guilt than the original enslavement. If at a former period, and under different circumstances, it did harbor such a meaning, it might now well address its " great expounder " as poor King John did his hard favored chamberlain, Hubert, in regard to the murder of Prince Arthur, 44 PERFORATIONS IN THE An obscure individual of -my acquaintance, who expects to meet some of his children that have gone innocent to another world, and will have nothing but the memory of his good name to leave to ten in this, thinks differently. The question is a very simple one and quite as much within the comprehension of a plain unlettered rustic as of a Statesman full of legal lore and ambitious hopes. It is simply this, Will you for any consideration be a party to a mean, wicked, and unjust act Yes or no? Statesmen talk about constitutional obligations, and persuade themselves by long lines of logic, reaching round Robin Hood's barn, that it is politic, and patriotic and vastly wise, and even heroically benevolent, under the "' solemn circumstances of the case," to be scoundrels, and so they answer YES. But men answer, No! No! NO! [Mark you here, my timid, carping, or sycophantic reader, I use the term scoundrel not retrospectively but prospectively. Don't you go off and accuse me of blasphemy against the honored dead and all that. What I say, and all I say, is, that whosoever shall now or hereafter, on free state soil, and under the blessed sunlight of this half century, aid, or vote to aid, in recapturing a slave who asserts his freedom, or vote to allow slavery on soil now free-aye, "But thou didst understand me by my signs, And dids't in signs again parley with sinl; Yea, without stop, didst let thy heart consent, And, consequently, thy rude hand to act The deed, which both our tongues held vile to name,Out of my sight, and never see me more." Nevertheless, I have the charity to believe that should it come to Mr. Webster's own " hand to act the deed," he would, like Hubert, relent and show himself a man, before he would burn out the intellectual eyes of a Douglass with the hot irons of slavery. EDITOR. cc LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS.;; 45 or vote against prohibiting it from such soil-is so far forth a scoundrel; as much, at least, as if he robbed a widow's hen roost, or put poison in lake Cochituatein my humble opinion.] But it does not follow that because a man refuses to commit a crime to save his house from being burnt over his head, he therefore sets no value upon his house, or because he refuses to vote for injustice and oppression to save the Union, he therefore thinks lightly of the Union, or is willing to sacrifice nothing to save it. For one I claim to set a higher value upon all that is peculiarly free in our republican country, and upon its perpetuity as the home of freedom, than it is possible for CIlay, Webster, or Cass to do. To me, obscure, weak, impatient of control-a nobody's slave, and myself a nobody-my country's freedom is my all. To the man of commanding talents, the machiavelian trimmer, able to repress every natural impulse, indifferently to ride on the crest of the tallest wave of party in a republic or share the spoils with the sovereign in a monarchy, it is a different matter. Republicanism is only one of the blessings which he prizes, not his all. The facility with which such men can do the worst deeds of monarchy and despotism, while professing a love for the Union, to my mind casts a doubt on the soundness of that profession. It is the common man, who loves his freedom of speech and opinion, and through the unpopularity of his opinions has no hope of office, whose love for the Union is to be depended on, for he is bound to it by his interests as well as his affections. He can only expect to lose by change. The love of high poli 46 PERFORATIONS IN THE ticians is necessarily doubtful, and the more so the more they profess it. They will of course love the Union while they have hopes of the Presidency, and they may stoop to very dishonorable means to preserve it. But, happily, if there is soundness in the view I have taken of the conditions of these times and their effect upon government-if government is no longer that grand disposer of destiny which Carlyle takes it to be, the threatened calamity is not so very terrible, and the suspension of "the public business" while it is impending is not likely to be quite fatal. Under the new conditions there is a possibility of a disunion without those dire consequences which we have been taught to apprehend, at least to that portion of the country which retains its republican principles. There is a possibility that we might get along without the Slave States and have as much peace and prosperity as we do now, and suffer in fact no diminution of any of our goods and chattels, spiritual or corporeal, except a little reduction of that national sense of bigness which really belongs to the old order of things, and may cost us more than it comes to. With the slave state portion of the country it is quite a different affair. The negro-eating lion roars dreadfully-it is his vocation-but he is under heavy bonds not to bite. To effect any thing with his teeth, he has a very serious task before him. I-e must not only tear to pieces and devour, whip-out and conquer us the northern Yankees, Buckeyes, Wildcats, Hoosiers and Suckers, but our steam engines, locomotives, fast presses, telegraphs, and machinery generally, to secure as c" LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS.7 47z much safety for his darling institution out of the Union, as the Free Soilers offer him in it. If he should sulk hard enough actually to withdraw and show fight for the territories, it might happen that we should be wise enough to let him have, either voluntarily or as the award of arbitration, Texas, however bounded, to go to the devil with. California would take care of herself. Slavery would then be extended up the Rio Grande —without our vote-but how long would it last any where? While it did last it would be a twelve hundred million bond on the South to keep the peace with us; but what becomes of the fugitive slave bill? Slavery would evaporate faster than ever. How rapid and dangerous to the institution the evaporation now is, the pitiful whining of the negro-eating lion, for aid to stop it, testifies. The simple truth is, that the same cause-the morning newspaper-which drives the king ont of Parliament, and makes Parliament itself little else than a ceremony, must also be fatal to the " institution " of Slavery. The emancipation of muscles by machinery is at the bottom of it all. Slaveholders may point us with exulting scorn to its fearful effect upon the uncultivated masses turned out by it to starve; this effect is only temporary. It is easily demonstrable that, with the new sources of wealth and power, poverty may be abolished, and all who will made comfortable. It requires only a just distribution of the gains from the new powers, only social law adapted to the new conditions. With free labor and no land monopoly; free presses, free schools and free pulpits; Europe may pour her "pauper " population upon us, and grass may grow 48 PERFORATIONS. in the spacious streets and owls nestle in the public buildings of Washington, and yet the United Republics of the free North shall laugh and prosper. They have slaves that never rebel nor run away, though they are fast runners-fire, wind, water and the forked lightnings-and they would gladly share the "plunder" with their southern brethren, would they consent to the arrangement on any decent conditions; but to enact both crimes and impossibilities-to be both scoundrels and fools-as the price of political union with our dear compatriots, is a little too hard! Our amiable and wise friend Carlyle, wrapped in the deep piety of his fearworship-truly in the " latter days " of that religionlonging to see stronger sceptres of iron and longer whips of leather, may rail at us as a no-govqrnment people, and attribute our " roast goose and apple sauce" to a little "respect for the street -constable,' and a great deal of 1" fertile waste land." The truth we claim to be, that we are beginning to have sense enough to dispense with kings and born rulers, and do our own governing in a quiet and inexpensive way, and with this faculty we will take in good part the broad hint to make our calls shorter and less frequent at Cheyne Row, and console ourselves as well as we can for the absence among our progeny of any such wise, noble and admirable souls, as he who conipliments negro slavery from that snug domicil.