The doctrine, that there is no higher law than the written statute, is but one of the symptoms of the steady drift of our leading politicians toward materialism, toward a faith which makes the products of man's industry of more value than man himself, and finds the god of this lower world in the law of demand and supply. "Cotton is King!" say such reasoners as Mr. Cushing;—"Conscience is King!" said such actors as the Puritans. To have a moral sense may be very unwise, very visionary, very unphilosophic; but most men are foolish enough to have one, and the enforcing of any law which wounds it is sure to arouse a resistance thoroughly pervading their whole being and lasting as life itself. The carrying away of a single fugitive[1] gave the Republicans a tenure of power in Massachusetts, as firm, and likely to be as enduring, as that of the Whigs was once. The propagandists of Slavery overreached themselves when they compelled the people of the North to be their accomplices. The higher law is not a thing men argue about, but act upon. People who admit the right of property a thousand miles off go back to first principles when the property comes to their door in the upright form of man and appeals for sympathy with a human voice.
Mr. Cushing represents Massachusetts to be a Babel of isms, so many square miles of Bedlam, from Boston Corner to Provincetown. Is this intended as a depreciation of our free institutions, by showing the results to which they inevitably lead? Has a Rarey for vicious hobbies been a desideratum so long, and has such a benefactor of his species found his avatar at last in Mr. Cushing? He tells us, however, that the delusion of Negrophilism, that is, Republicanism, is on the wane, and is destined to speedy extinction. The very extravagancies he speaks of as so rife and so rampant are to us evidence of the contrary. They prove the depth to which the religious instincts of the Northern people have been stirred upon the question of Slavery. Such extravagancies have accompanied every great moral movement of mankind. The Reformation, the great Puritan Rebellion, the French Revolution, brought them forth in swarms. A profound historical thinker, Gervinus, remarks, that the political enthusiasm of a nation is slow to warm and swift to cool, but that its moral enthusiasm is quickly stirred and long in subsiding. Thinking men will ask themselves whether the isms Mr. Cushing enumerates be not the external symptoms of such an enthusiasm,—and whether it be wise, under the names of "Nationality" and "Conservatism," to urge aggressions to the point where it becomes the right and the duty of men to consider the terrible necessity of a change in their system of government; whether it be unpatriotic to resist the extension of a system which makes the mass of the population an element of danger and weakness in the body politic, as its advocates admit by their scheme for a foreign protectorate of their proposed independent organization,—a system which renders public education impossible, exhausts the soil, necessitates sparseness of population, and demoralizes the governing classes.[2]
The ethical aspects of Slavery are not and cannot be the subject of consideration with any party which proposes to act under the Constitution of the United States. Nor are they called upon to consider its ethnological aspect. Their concern with it is confined to the domain of politics, and
- ↑ It is a coincidence that the recapture of runaways did more than anything else to abolish villanage in England.
- ↑ See Cobb on Slavery, (Philadelphia: T. & J. W. Johnson & Co., 1858,) where these admissions are made. (Introd. pp. 218-220.) This work, written by Mr. Thomas R. R. Cobb, of Georgia, is, considering the natural prepossessions of the author, singularly calm and candid. We commend it to our readers, as bringing together a great deal of information, and still more as showing the remarkable change which has come over the Southern mind, even among moderate men, on the subject of Slavery. We shall take a future occasion to notice it more fully.
