THE

ECLECTIC REVIEW,

FOR JUNE, 1815.

Art. I. De la Traite et de l'Esclavage des Noirs et des Blancs. Par un Ami des Hommes de toutes les Couleurs. pp. 84. Paris. Adrien Egron, Imprimeur. 1815.

On the Slave Trade and the Slavery of Blacks and Whites. By a Friend of Men of all Colours.

(Concluded from Page 498.)

IT is the peculiar aggravation of moral evil, that it has an inherent tendency to perpetuate itself by so combining with our nature as gradually to obliterate the sense of its enormity; and not only to destroy all hope and all desire of change, but to disqualify the mind for a state of emancipation. There are many circumstances of debasement or suffering, which would be contemplated from a distance as unmixed evil, but which are acquiesced in as existing by uncontrollable necessity, and become, at length, even tolerable in the endurance. The mind accommodates itself to the unnatural element which has enveloped it, and says in effect to the instruments of its degradation,

Evil, be thou my good!'

There seems, indeed, to be a point, although wholly undefinable, beyond which the agency of human or superhuman malignity, is employed in counteraction of itself. The mind recoils from the pressure with sudden and irresistible violence. But in those grand instances with which history has made us familiar, and which have been termed Reformation, Revolution, or Revolt, according to the degree of success that has attended them :-in all these cases, it is painfully humiliating to reflect, how very far less have intelligent desires of light, and freedom, and virtue, VOL. III. N.S. 2 Q

operated in the minds of the agents in those affairs, than a merely instinctive impatience of suffering. There have, perhaps, at all times, been a few, who have risen above the narrow views and sordid wants of the mass; who, in the crisis of civil commotion, or danger, have come forward as the champions of the interests of humanity, and have either succeeded in guiding the blind faction to the achievement of good, or perished, like Curtius in the opened gulf. But the multitude is composed of men who weep with want, and are mad with oppression, or are desperate by too quick a sense of a constant infelicity;' or of others who, from the restlessness of passion, delight in the turbulence of change and among persons of this description, the objects of attainment, beyond that of mere relief from the pressing evil, are of the most vague nature. That can hardly be the object of desire, which has never been made intelligible by experience, or endeared by remembrance.

When struggles of this nature have issued successfully, and the cause of individual man has triumphed over the league of oppression, it excites the most desponding feelings, to perceive how little has been effected, while the people have remained unable to appreciate, or to profit by, the result:-to behold prison walls thrown down, but its enfranchised inmates unable to bear the free, unintercepted light of the sun;-a nation delivered, but incapacitated for the reception and enjoyment of its freedom;the holds, and dens, and blood-stained altars of evil-essential evil-overthrown, or laid open, and the infatuated multitude eagerly preparing to build up the ruins, and to return to their serpent-worship.

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Slavery is an evil:-to him who is the author, and him who is the victim of it, it is alike an evil and a curse. The relations of master and slave, admit not of duty, afford no scope for virtue, and preclude all affection. Though in its forms of extreme rigour, slavery may provoke resistance and incite to revenge, yet, under many degrading shapes, we find that its continuance is provided for in the morbid indolence, the selfish acquiescence, and the servile fear, which it has produced. The man who desires freedom for a possession, not from indolence but for the sake of being free, that man is free, though bound with fetters. The influence of liberty on all the intellectual and moral attributes of man, shews, that it is no chimera.-Let a nation thus deserve freedom, and, sooner or later, it must be free!

Ignorance is an evil-the greatest of evils, inasmuch as it tends to augment and perpetuate every other, by precluding the entrance of all good. Its fatal influence not only indisposes the mind to exertions for its own deliverance, but has uniformly excited a malignant opposition to every attempt to enlighten mankind. It is a darkness which men love better than light, because

it conceals danger, and favours the slumbers of indolence and the dreams of folly. And so completely does this evil tend, by long continuance, to disqualify the mind for a better state of things, that it is only in the earliest stages of its development, that it is capable of being trained, by the patient process of education, to habits of intelligence. Hopeless is the attempt to superinduce any moral change, or any considerable degree of intellectual improvement, by the ordinary agency of man, on the actual race of beings who make up the effective population.Their characters are fixed; their faculties have attained their utmost growth; the range of their ideas, circumscribed by prejudice and custom, is incapable of receiving addition. It is with youth, and even childhood, that the labours of the philanthropist must begin and to these, among the lower orders especially, the successful prosecution of moral culture will be confined. A generation must pass away :-the leaf, as yet green, must fade, and wither, and fall, before a more cheering prospect can present itself, and the face of Nature be essentially changed.

That war is an infernal complication of physical and moral evil few will, in theory, deny, with how little soever compunction or reluctance potentates and statesmen have, in every age, resorted to it as the amende honorable for the most trifling grievances. Viewed, indeed, as a mere game, combined of skill and hazard, it is of all pursuits the most stirring and glorious. Abstracted from their consequences,

The triumph, and the vanity,

The rapture of the strife,

The earthquake voice of Victory,'

must constitute a state of turbulent excitement in which we can conceive some minds may find an appropriate delight. All other actions and circumstances of life must, compared with the joys of battle, appear insipid. The fearful alternation of the mind. between triumph and despair, the vastness of the stake, and the intensity of effort to which all the energies of nature seem then to be wrought up ;-above all, those indefinite ideas of martial glory which have been found to prevail over all fear and all suffering; must give to the hour of actual contest a strange delirious ecstacy. Such is the notion of war which it seems to be part of our education to imbibe. With martial achievements and martial glory, the studies of our earliest youth have taught us to associate ideas of manliness, true heroism, and moral grandeur : and from the age of Homer to that of modern romance, poetry has been employed in throwing over scenes of horrible destruction, an air of chivalrous enterprise and picturesque sublimity. But to those who know War in its details of enormity and misery; who have followed in the rear of its ravages, and

tracked its steps by the whitening bones of its victims :-to those who, after the conflict, have listened, in the silence of midnight, to the faint groans or dying yells which bespoke the remains of life in some hundreds of agonizing sufferers; or who, in moods of deeper abstraction, have seemed to hear the sullen plunge which each individual spirit, when forced from its every lurking place of life, has made in the dark waters that bound mortality, the shriek of separation, and the awful murmurs of eternity:-to those who think of war as connected with these details, and with the widow's curse and the orphan's wretchedness, it is indeed an unutterable evil. But under no other form is the active tendency of evil to perpetuate itself, by demoralizing the mind, and engendering new and unnatural appetites, more unequivocally displayed. What has been the effect of the past twenty years of carnage and suffering, but to transform the peasantry of Europe into an armed population, a hydra multitude, whose thirst for blood has been stimulated alternately by rapine and revenge; to merge all the civil distinctions of society in those of military rank; and to create, in every civilized country that has been brought into the conflict, interests dependent on the prolongation of hostilities, and permanent obstacles to continued peace What can be expected from nations whose supposed interests forbid a longer cessation from war, than exhaustion or poverty, the occasions of the drunkard's soberness and the libertine's virtue, necessitates?

In the "Great Nation', the lust of conquest, which, under every dynasty, has characterized her rulers, and in which the lowest classes participate, that restless ambition which has, through a long succession of ages, made that country the enemy of Europe, forbids the idea of a lasting tranquillity. Under the demoralizing influence of a military despotism, France has, in fact, become a nation altogether military; all other avenues to distinction and opulence, have been closed upon her empoverished nobility: hereditary rank, commercial eminence, ecclesiastical dignity, the honours attached to public stations;-all have been either annihilated in the progress of revolutionary policy, or merged in the titles and de signations of martial hobility. With a numerous class War has, we fear, become a want; not only an appetite, but a means of subsistence. At least, it is looked to as affording the only field for distinction; and, in the mind of a Frenchman, Peace is connected with inglorious poverty. Such is the active tendency of War to perpetuate itself, by weakening the influence of those motives which would lead to its extirpation, and by incapacitating a nation for the enjoyment of the blessings it rejects.

M. Grégoire, in the first chapter of the pamphlet before us, has judiciously remarked, that talents are not the standard of rights. It is equally true, whether in application to an indivi

dual, or a community, that our natural rights are not determined by our moral virtues. It is no apology for arbitrarily perpetuating the bondage of a slave, that he is unworthy to be free, when his vices are, probably, in no small degree, the fruits of his degradation. Nor can a nation be justly considered as having forfeited by its crimes its unalienable political rights; though pleas less specious even than this, have been resorted to in justification of tyranny. Nevertheless, it is true, and it is a most important truth, that in order to capacitate an individual or a nation, for the enjoyment of natural rights, moral emancipation must precede political freedom. The injury which human natare has through a long period sustained, from the combined operation of the evils we have enumerated, is too radically deep to allow of its receiving immediate benefit from any external change. The removal of those causes which have occasioned its depression-its debasement, can lead but remotely to the good which a sanguine mind may anticipate. This is a circumstance of which our political speculatists seem to take little account; whereas, it would seem, that the only effectual counteraction of political evils, is to be supplied by the gradual operation of the moral means of rectifying the sentiments, and of emancipating the intellects of the community.

The total inadequacy of all political establishments and regulations, to restrain the incursions of audacious violence, or to provide for the happiness or repose of nations, has been fully evinced by a series of practical experiments, made under every variety of form that human sagacity could devise. No people were ever constituted a virtuous, an intelligent, a happy people, by legislative enactments. These can only remove the obstacles which impede their becoming so. Were there nothing better in store for a nation, therefore, than what the wisdom of a Senate or a Congress might confer, should the happiness of nations ever chance to become a prominent object in their deliberations, the prospect would be sufficiently gloomy. And were there no other means of promoting a better state of things, than subsidy, or the sword, we might at once resign ourselves to the triumph of evil. But a gleam of hope seems to enliven the cheerless scene. One method yet remains to be tried, which statesmen and potentates have neglected to employ. It is at length found out, that ignorance is not essential—is not even conducive to the safety of a state, or the interests of society. It is admitted, at least by theorists, that slavery is an evil which recoils on the oppressor. And who can say, that after a few more campaigns of fruitless butchery, the Rulers of the world will not, at length, learn, that War is not the very best means of ensuring either their common or their individual interests ? For ourselves, however, we confess that we look with no very sanguine expectations of moral improvement to any political changes, any fortuitous combi