Page:African slavery regarded from an unusual stand-point.djvu/6

 rude idolater—lowest in the scale of human beings. We have representations of the negro by six different nations of antiquity; by the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Etruscans, the Persians, Greeks, and Romans—pictures of him, delineated at periods varying from twenty-five hundred years B. C., downwards toward our own era, and invariably he is represented just as we see him now, and almost always with the distinctive badges of servitude. In the tombs of kings who reigned in Egypt before Moses, we have seen accurate representations of the negro, with the same dress, the same figure, the same color which he possesses, as we see him gaily chattering in the slave marts of Cairo. The same he appears in the monument of the Persian king of Cyrus. The Etruscan vases equally portray the negro, in still another country of the world, as the slave of a superior race. And, just as in the earliest period of recorded history, the negro is found to have been subject to any other race with which he came in contact, so we find him now in many lands. In Algeria, in Tunis, in Tripoli, in Egypt, in Asia Minor, in Turkey, in Russia, in Greece, and in Italy, wherever we have seen him, we have found him the virtual slave of the white, just as he is in the southern States, in the Indian territories, or in the northern States of this Republic; for he is a slave to-day among us as unequivocally as in South Carolina. The great difference between his status in one of the southern States and one of the northern is here; there he is a slave of individuals, here he is the slave of society. Only certain occupations are permitted to this inferior class, which cannot vote, which cannot bear arms, which cannot hold office, and which cannot intermarry with the whites. From the border of many States it is ignominiously excluded; and many enthusiastic Black Republican States, while making war upon the South for holding this race in bondage, yet cruelly exclude them from the enjoyment of even the Heaven-given franchises of earth, air and water. We have then to deal with a race that in times past has had many opportunities of civilization, which came in contact with the first great civilization that the world knew—with India—and melted away before it; which, when the Chinese empire commenced to be great, was found among them, but soon retreated, as though before something uncongenial; and in the course of time, as the Nigritian race retreats in a southerly direction, there follows close upon its heels the empires of Babylon and of Ninevah, the civilizations of Phœnicia, of the Jews, of Egypt, and of Carthage.

But from none of these did the black race absorb learning or the arts. It left no trace behind it in works beneficial to the human family; and if we follow the path which it took in its southward march, until we reach the highest peak in the Abyssinian mountains, to then turn our gaze northward, we can see nothing which the African has added to the stock of human learning; not an iota which it has bequeathed for the advancement of the human race; not the faintest trace of an addition to the happiness or comfort of mankind which it has made. If we cast our gaze to the south, we shall behold at least fifty millions of negroes sunk in the profoundest ignorance and barbarism, inhabiting their own home in the same condition they were when they had the best opportunity of receiving civilization from India, from China, from Asia, from Asia Minor, or from Egypt. Now, although not prepared to say with the poet, that "whatever is, is right," we yet hold that whatever has been from the beginning is founded on some natural law, and that it is the peculiar duty of statesmen to deal with things as they are, while not imitating the madness of those architects of ruin in the last French Revolution, who sought to cut and trim society with