Page:African slavery regarded from an unusual stand-point.djvu/5

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pursuits. The Magyars are the dominant race, and would have succeeded in their revolutionary struggle were it not that the Selavonians sympathized with their kindred in blood—the Russians—so that the most bitter scenes of that war occurred between these neighbors of a thousand years.) Until recently, the Frankish race or Germanic, composing the aristocracy, ruled the mass of the French, who were Celtic; and to-day the Normans of England domineer, as aristocrats, over the ancient Britons, the Welsh and the Irish Celts. It is scarcely necessary for us to advert to the fact that the wars of modern times spring from this question of race; that even the somewhat mixed race of Italy is striving for Italian unity and nationality; that in the war between Russia and Turkey, the Selavonian provinces of Austria, of Prussia, and of Italy, all exhibited the strongest leaning toward their brethren in Russia; that the revolution now progressing in China is a war between the Chinese and their Tartar masters; that, in fine, the tendency throughout the whole world is towards an instinctive national unity. Thus we might go over the whole world, showing that races of nearly kindred blood ruled, the one over the other, but it is unnecessary. These different races have been so commingled in the United States that we have merely a struggle between all the branches of the great Caucasian family on the one, hand, and the African race on the other—between the highest and lowest, races of the earth. But the subject is with us much simplified, for it is between the white race and the black, and we do not find it necessary to enter into the subject of the original unity or diversity of the origin of men. Whether the Bible be interpreted, to say that we are all descended from Adam and Eve or not, or whether, if so descended, there were some natural laws, since ceasing to exist, which, in antediluvian ages, produced changes in the races of men, it is not necessary to inquire. It is sufficient tor us that for four or five thousand years there have existed the same differences between different races of mankind, as are now observed; and we hold that if there have been no material changes produced in five thousand years, that it will certainly require some thousands of years to destroy these distinctions. If we can show that the negro has been the slave of every other race with whom he came in contact, for five thousand years, it is fair to argue that it will require some thousands of years to elevate him to an equality with those races. By means of monumental history as well as written, through the aid of the sciences of philology, craniology and the other branches of learning, which go to make up the science of ethnology, we can trace back the history of the races now inhabiting the earth to a period nearly five thousand years before Christ, at which time Europe and Asia seem to have been in the condition which we shall describe. The black race had strayed from its own country up even into the mountains of India and China, as to-day certain tribes, there lost, indicate.

When the black race, yielding to the yellow and the white, receded into Africa, the white race was in occupation of the great plateaus of Central Asia, surrounded to the north, east, and west by the yellow race. To these two races the African yielded in turn. As he receded from Europe, civilization followed, and the great empires of Assyria, of Babylon, and of Egypt were close upon his retreating footsteps. He withdrew into the land of the sun and his birth—Africa—leaving behind him no marks of culture, no civil institutions, no temples built in honor of the Deity, no legacies of learning, or science, or art, for the benefit of humanity; and in Africa, in India, in China, and in Asia Minor, to-day, as five thousand years ago, he is without religion, without organized society, without civil equality—-