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all their experience there, they looked upon Emancipation as a blessing."
Here ends our chapter on the West Indies. What inference can be drawn from all this?
We answer—First: That Emancipation in the United States is safe. If it was so in Jamaica, where the whites were as one to fifteen, will it not be in Maryland, where they are more than three to one, in Kentucky, where they are nearly four to one, in Missouri, where they are nearly ten to one?
Second: It will be politic. If the freeing of half a million of slaves in 1793, saved St. Domingo from falling into the hands of England, the freeing of four millions, in 1862, may save the Cotton States from a like fate, which even our recent and brilliant victories perhaps may hasten.
Third: It must not be attended by forced colonization. If the great want of the West Indies is labor, with what expectation can we ship out of our Southern States two-thirds of the laboring population? Immigration is the demand in the West Indies, it would be folly for us to try emigration.
Fourth. It must not be gradual, but immediate and complete. If the experience of Antigua and Jamaica teaches anything, it teaches that simultaneous and entire emancipation is the safest, the cheapest, and the wisest course.
Fifth. It will attract more white men to the South than it will send black men to the North. This is the opinion of a sensible fugitive, to whom we owe the statement; but the history of immigration to the West Indies, and to Mauritius and Bourbon proves it true. Why should the negroes come here after emancipation? On the contrary, reasons both of climate and of political economy will carry them South in great numbers, not only from the border States, but from the North and from Canada.
Finally, these facts prove, what no man of lofty virtue ever can doubt,—That Justice is always expedient.
The Greeks had a story which devout old Herodotus has preserved, that Glaucus, the Spartan, wishing to commit an injustice, and to confirm it by an oath, asked of the oracle if he might do so. "Glaucus, son of Epicydes!" answered the priestess, in her solemn chant, "for the present perjury is prolitable, and theft; swear, then, for death lies in wait for the just and the unjust. But there is a nameless child of perjury, without hands; without feet, yet swiftly she pursues till she clutches and destroys thy race, and all thy house. But the race of the just man flourishes forever."
Thus the oracle. "And now," adds the narrator, "there is no descendant of Glaucus at all, nor any branch of the stock of Glaucus; but he has been cast forth from Sparta, root and branch."
Centuries earlier, the wise Athenian law-giver, in grave verse, which Demosthenes loved to quote, had warned his countrymen of the same truth.[1]
My soul, Athenians, prompts me to relate
What miseries upon injustice wait.
Riches by theft, and cozenage to possess,
The sacred bound of Justice ye transgress;
Who silent see the present, knows the past,
And will revenge these injuries at last.
But Justice all things orderly designs,
And in strict fetters the unjustt confines.
What's sour she sweetens, and allays what cloys.
Wrong she repels, ill in the growth destroys,
Softens the stubborn, the unjust reforms,
And in the state (illegible text) all seditious storms.
Bitter dissensions by her rule supprest,
Who wisely governs all thing's for the best.
And earlier yet, the stern warnings of the Hebrew sage, who led forth his despised people from the oppression of Egypt, had announced the eternal law with no doubtful voice:
"Beware that thou forget not the Lord thy God, in not keeping his commandments and his judgments, and his statutes which I command this day; lest when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein:
And when thy flocks and thy herds multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied:
Then thine heart he lifted up, and thou forget, the Lord thy God. … And thou say in thine heart, my power and the might of my hand hath gotten me this wealth.
And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the Lord thy God, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish.
As the nations which the Lord destroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient into the voice of the Lord your God."—Deuteronomy viii 11-20.
- ↑ Demosthenes, False Legationn, 255. Stanley's Translation in the History of Philosophy.
