tially the same. Mankind would not do this if they could, and they could not do it if they would. They like in the main to live, and they want bread and beef, not death and nothingness, to give them comfort; for even their vices are faults of vitality, not of deadness, and they love strong drink because it seems to give them spirit, not because it may lay them dead, or as if dead, by excess. A French physician ascribes the pessimism of Germans to the use of beer, which stupefies, while wine cheers the heart; yet the beer-drinker drinks for pleasure, and he also smokes for enjoyment, however unwisely. Then, moreover, what is more evident than that if men could cheat the blind power that compelled them into conscious being, and will themselves 'out of it, that same blind power would probably repeat the old wrong and will them back into being again, or create another, perhaps a more cursed race?

The whole tone of this system is degrading as it is disheartening; and, proud as its leaders are of their ethics of resignation and compassion, they strike at the root of ethics by striking at the idea of right and duty under supreme justice. While they make light of pleasure, and deny that it can hold its own in comparison with pain, they really exalt pleasure above virtue by denying that there is anything to live for in the face of suffering, and by maintaining that it is best to go out of existence, because we cannot have a good time by staying in it. There is little reason to believe that this creed of despair will inspire the mass of men with any exalted resignation, or still the rage of communists, by its assertion of the wretchedness of the rich as well as of the poor. Sakyamuni might persuade the mild people of India to wait for the Nirvâna of oblivion, but the mob of Europe and America are not of that passive temper. They want money and meals, and they will not be led to seek them by gentle or by just means, by being taught that blind Will rules the universe, or that whatever reason there is in Nature is unconscious and serves blind Will, and that there is no hope but in death. Pessimism may be the white flag of peace and resignation to the dreamy thinker, but it is the black flag of blood and booty to the ignorant and the wretched, and not only to them but to the well-to-do workman who may be led to believe what this system falsely

1

teaches, that labor itself is an evil, and it is better to die than to work.

Instead of taking a desponding view of this philosophy of despair, however, it is well to remember that the great ages of faith and regeneration have been accompanied by an intense sense of existing evils, and have not been times of cheerfulness and prosperity. The Christian civilization sprang up in a dark time, when the old faiths were decaying, and the might of Rome threatened to crush the life of nations, and the worst superstitions were seeking to supplant the falling idols and to fill the deserted shrines. Among these superstitions there are traces of the Buddhism that is now appearing in the high places of modern thought and life. Why not look for a triumph of good as decided as the threatening evil, a new Christendom in this new Rome of money and pleasure, luxury and misery, which so invites enthusiasm and tempts despair? There is evil enough to make pessimists of those who see nothing else. Is there not good enough to overcome that evil by the only true optimism, the faith and the purpose that see a divine meaning in existence, and are determined to live up to its standard, and learn by faithful service the secret that philosophy fails to teach? It has been well said that as the electric spark turns the flaming oxygen and the torpid nitrogen into vital air, thus the true fire so joins the good with the evil in the world as to make the reconciliation a triumphant redemption. Perhaps, with health of body and of mind, with comprehensive service and brave faith and manhood, we may see some such sequel to the pessimism of the nineteenth century. SAMUEL OSGOOD.

VIII.

ANTIPATHY TO THE NEGRO.

Is it true, then, as Southern statesmen so often told us in the days before the war, that the white man and the negro cannot live together as equals?

It

Alone among Southern gentlemen of the old school who have left their opinions on accessible record, General Washington entertained the thought of freeing the slaves without removing them; and with him it was only a thought, uttered in response to one of Lafayette's fervent appeals on behalf of the slave. is doubtful if this foremost man of the Western world could have obtained in the Legislature of his native State respectful consideration of such a scheme, so rooted and so general was the conviction that harmonious coöperation between the two races was possible only so long as the white man held the handle of the whip, and the black man felt the lash. General Washington had probably witnessed the scene that occurred in the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1769, when Colonel Richard Bland moved the repeal of the law which forbade the emancipation of slaves unless they were sent out of the colony. Neither the gray hairs nor the shining talents nor the eminent standing of the mover saved him from abuse. He was styled an enemy of his country; he was treated with indecorum by a body noted for its exact observance of decorum.

The case was supposed to be one of such extreme incompatibility that the mere suggestion of any remedy short of separation gave offense; and separation happened to be then, as it is now, the only remedy that was impossible of application. Mr. Jefferson had an amiable, impossible project of educating the slaves in science, arts, and industry, and sending them gradually away at the public expense to some "convenient" part of the earth, where they were to be set up in business, the returning vessels to

bring home a high class of white immigrants to supply their places -a scheme that would have overtasked the richest and most powerful empire. The later project of colonization, so fascinating to philanthropists fifty years ago, would have kept the fleets of the greatest naval power busy in the mere transportation of the daily increase of a race so prolific.

The wisest man is a fool, the strongest man is weak, when he pits himself against inexorable facts. Among the names that figure in the early history of the republic, that of James Madison is among the most justly and widely honored; for his patient and modest fidelity to every trust won the respect of men whom his measures displeased. How wild seems to us his scheme of deportation! Providence itself, he thought, had in one bountiful gift indicated the method, provided the place, and supplied the means. Our illimitable Western wilderness, peopled then only by a few scattered tribes of red-men, a virgin world, too remote to enter yet into the scheme of the United States-why should it not furnish a home for the slaves? It would cost to buy them of their masters six hundred million dollars, a sum that could be raised by the sale of two hundred million acres; and, as the slaves were gradually bought, they could be settled upon the unsold portion of the Western lands. The excellent heart of Madison swelled with the thought. "To what object so good, so great, and so glorious," he wrote as recently as 1819, "could that peculiar fund of wealth be appropriated?" Two wide expanses of desert would be brought under culture, and the price paid for one of them by freemen would fill with freemen the other; and thus two free and happy communities would be created by the same act of Congress! And if our forefathers have wronged the colored man, he added, what better atonement can we make than this?

Among the reasons given by Southern statesmen for this supposed necessity of separation, some have been proved by events to be fallacious. Mr. Madison, a large slaveholder all his life, had the impression that the black man's natural aversion to labor would yield to nothing but compulsion. Even the chance of working out his freedom, he thought, would not make him work, much less the ordinary motive of gaining a comfortable subsist

ence.

How mistaken he was, the five million bales of cotton

raised this year without the aid of the overseer's whip sufficiently attest. It is strange that so wise an observer, the owner of a hundred slaves, and a master who never permitted the lash to be used upon his estate, should have held such an opinion.* The present writer, by one of the chances of the late war, had a female servant for many months, who was born and bred a slave upon the ancestral lands of the Madisons, in Virginia, and he can bear witness, not merely that she was industrious, but that industry seemed as instinctive in her as in ourselves, and as necessary to her enjoyment of life.

Both Madison and Jefferson thought that the slaves, if emancipated without deportation, would go from under their masters' control cherishing ten thousand bitter recollections of wrongs and cruelties; that a thirst for revenge, a deep, vindictive hate, would possess them, which, conspiring with other causes, would issue in a war that would probably end only by the extermination of one of the colors. How little the mansion, in any land or time, knows of the cottage! So, now, we hear dainty people, in brown-stone dwellings, talking of the dangerous classes, meaning the patient and anxious laborers who inhabit distant and unornamented streets of their city. There is little vindictiveness in the negro; else, he were no problem for us to solve; he would solve himself. We saw the homes of the South at his mercy during the war; he was their provider, their solicitous, affectionate guardian. Not a solitary instance has been reported, and probably not one has occurred, of an emancipated slave in the Southern States attempting or desiring to avenge a wrong received from a former master.

There was one argument for the separation of the colors which was insisted on equally by philosophic statesmen and by the thoughtless multitude: we may call it the antipathy argument. The opinion was almost universal, forty years ago, both at the North and the South, that there was an antipathy between the two races of the same nature, and implanted for the same end, as

* One of his slaves said of him: "Mr. Madison, I think, was one of the best men that ever lived. I never saw him in a passion, and never knew him to strike a slave, although he had over one hundred; neither would he allow an overseer to do it. When any slaves were reported to him as stealing or cutting-up badly, he would send for them and admonish them privately, and never mortify them by doing it before others. They generally served him very faithfully."-"A Colored Man's Reminiscences of James Madison," p. 17.