THOMAS CARLYLE ON THE SLAVE QUESTION. A LATE number of Fraser's Magazine contains an article bearing the unmistakable impress of the AngloGerman peculiarities of Thomas Carlyle, entitled "“An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question," which would be interesting as a literary curiosity were it not in spirit and tendency so unspeakably wicked as to excite in every rightminded reader a feeling of amazement and disgust. With a hard, brutal audacity, a blasphemous irreverence, and a sneering mockery which would do honor to the devil of Faust, it takes issue with the moral sense of mankind and the precepts of Christianity. Having ascertained that the exports of sugar and spices from the West Indies have diminished since emancipation, and that the negroes, having worked, as they believed, quite long enough without wages, now refuse to work for the planters without higher pay than the latter, with the thriftless and evil habits of slavery still clinging to them, can afford to give, the author considers himself justi - fied in denouncing negro emancipation as one of the "shams" which he was specially sent into this world to belabor. Had he confined himself to simple abuse and caricature of the self-denying and Christian abolitionists of England-"the broad-brimmed philanthropists of Exeter Hall". there would have been small occasion for noticing his splenetic and discreditable production. Doubtless there is a cant of philanthropy the alloy of human frailty and folly—in the most righteous reforms, which is a fair subject for the indignant sarcasm of a professed hater of shows and falsities. Whatever is hollow and hypocritical in politics, morals, or religion comes very properly within the scope of his mockery, and we bid him God speed in applying his satirical lash upon it. Impostures and frauds of all kinds deserve nothing better than detection and exposure. Let him blow them up to his heart's content, as Daniel did the image of Bell and the Dragon. But our author, in this matter of negro slavery, has undertaken to apply his explosive pitch and rosin, not to the affectation of humanity, but to humanity itself. He mocks at pity, scoffs at all who seek to lessen the amount of pain and suffering, sneers at and denies the most sacred rights, and mercilessly consigns an entire class of the children of his heavenly Father to the doom of compulsory servitude. He vituperates the poor black man with a coarse brutality which would do credit to a Mississippi slave driver, or a renegade Yankee dealer in human cattle on the banks of the Potomac. His rhetoric has a flavor of the slave pen and auction block — vulgar, unmanly, indecent a scandalous outrage upon good taste and refined feeling—which at once degrades the author and insults his readers. He assumes (for he is one of those sublimated philosophers who reject the Baconian system of induction and depend upon intuition without recourse to facts and figures) that the emancipated. class in the West India islands are universally idle, improvident, and unfit for freedom; that God created them to be the servants and slaves of their "born lords," the white men, and designed them to grow sugar, coffee, and spices for their masters, instead of raising pumpkins and yams for themselves; and that, if they will not do this, "the beneficent whip" should be again employed to compel them. He adopts, in speaking of the black class, the lowest slang of vulgar prejudice. "Black Quashee," sneers the gentlemanly philosopher,"black Quashee, if he will not help in bringing out the spices, will get himself made a slave again, (which state will be a little less ugly than his present one,) and with beneficent whip, since other methods avail not, will be compelled to work." It is difficult to treat sentiments so atrocious and couched in such offensive language with any thing like respect. Common sense and unperverted conscience revolt instinctively against them. The doctrine they inculcate is that which underlies all tyranny and wrong of man towards man. It is that under which "the creation groaneth and travaileth unto this day." It is as old as sin; the perpetual argument of strength against weakness, of power against right; that of the Greek philosopher, that the barbarians, being of an inferior race, were born to be slaves to the Greeks; and of the infidel Hobbes, that every man, being by nature at war with every other man, has a perpetual right to reduce him to servitude if he has the power. It is the cardinal doctrine of what John Quincy Adams has very properly styled "the Satanic school of philosophy" the ethics of an old Norse sea robber or an Arab plunderer of caravans. It is as widely removed from the "sweet humanities" and unselfish benevolence of Christianity as the faith and practice of the East India Thug or the New Zealand, cannibal. Our author does not, however, take us altogether by surprise. He has before given no uncertain intimations of the point towards which his philosophy was tending. In his brilliant essay upon Francia of Paraguay, for instance, we find him entering with manifest satisfaction and admiration into the details of his hero's tyranny. In his Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell — in half a dozen pages of savage and almost diabolical sarcasm directed against the growing humanity of the age, the "rose-pink sentimentalisms," and squeamishness which shudders at the sight of blood and infliction of pain — he prepares the way for a justification of the massacre of Drogheda. More recently he has intimated that the extermination of the Celtic race is the best way of settling the Irish question; and that the enslavement and forcible transportation of her poor, to labor under armed taskmasters in the colonies, is the only rightful and proper remedy for the political and social evils of England. In the Discourse on Negro Slavery we see this devilish philosophy in full bloom. The gods, he tells us, are with the strong. Might has a divine right to rule blessed are the crafty of brain and strong of hand! Weakness is crime. "Væ victis!” as Brennus said when he threw his sword into the scale Woe to the conquered! The negro is weaker in intellect than his "born lord," the white man, and has no right to choose his own vocation. Let the latter do it for him, and, if need be, return to the "beneficent whip." "On the side of the oppressor there is power; " let him use it without mercy, and hold flesh and blood to the grindstone with unrelenting rigor. Humanity is squeamishness; pity for the suffering, mere "rose-pink sentimentalism," maudlin and unmanly. The |