Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/49



or enjoy the light so evidently prepared by the Anglo Saxon's God for the special benefit of his most favored race. The English collier who beats to death his Belgian fellow craftsman, does not condescend to invoke in his defence this well-known superiority, but finds a sufficient excuse in the established right of a noble Briton not to be interfered with in the winning of bread. Wherever we turn the family resemblance is perfect. The American branch is legitimately begotten, and if John Bull is not proud of his offspring, he at least must confess the paternal relationship, for it is obviously true that the Anglo-Saxon family, upon which, unfortunately for the weak, the sun never sets, is a slavewhipping race wherever found all over the world.

But if our own conduct has been so true to the traditions of our race, why did we expect so much from, and why were we so disappointed at the action of our cousins in the old world? Why should we not rather admire that conservatism of tryranny which still maintained the prescriptive right of Englishmen to be arrogant selfish and brutal? The answer is, that it is a weakness of our nature to condemn with special severity a vice which we feel that we have finally abandoned. The reformed drunkard soon ripens into the most zealous and perhaps the most intolerant of apostles of abstinence. The first step of the penitent gamester is to destroy all cards and dice within his reach. The youthful habit of long. hours of sleep, so necessary to the complete development of the human constitution, is naturally abandoned by most men at about five and forty. Nature no longer permits it. At five and fifty the individual has forgotten the time when he did otherwise than rise early, and before three score years and ten are reached, many old men honestly think that the rising generation is wasting its best energies in self-indulgence and unnecessary slumber, and sinking into

habits of hopeless indolence and sloth. They have left off the vice so long that they have forgotten that they ever had it. And so it is with nations. For nearly seyen years past the great majority of educated Americans in the North have taken a lively interest in the extirpation of slavery. And that trifling period has sufficed to wipe out all recollection of that other darker time, when they were as willing to uphold and sustain it. Seven years ago the Republican party was the only organization in the land with influence sufficient to be materially fe!t in public affairs, and which at the same time acknowledged the holding of principles hostile to the peculiar institution of the South. And that Republican party disclaimed vehemently any intent to interfere with slavery, except to prevent its spread into territories then free from it. Its members felt insulted when the infamous epithet of abolitionist was applied to them. Now thousands who at that time acted with the pro-slavery party, have forgotten their old sympathy, and are unequal to the mental task of conceiving how any except their own opinions can be honestly held. The truth is, that we thought the English better than ourselves; that they were more moral, less selfish, and generally farther advanced in civilization than we were. And when we learned by putting the matter to practical proof, that they were not, and that thanks to the war we were drifting into just views more rapidly than they, we turned to the other extreme and easily convinced ourselves that they were so bad as scarcely to be entitled to a place in the ranks of civilized nations.

For the first two years of the struggle we were not abolitionists. But we had never pretended to be such. Nor were the English so except in name. This we learned greatly to our disgust, for we argued: What right have those people beyond the sea to countenance siaveholding against the protestations ofa halt