Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/105

 and the professions allied with them; the remainder—the vast majority—became wages-slaves, or else fell into the other degraded sections of proletarianism already described.

In our modern society, the pride and exclusiveness of the upstart burgess-class towards their proletarian brethren is not less insulting and obdurate than were the same qualities in the ancient nobles towards the slave-class from which these burgesses are derived. If our modern middle-classes have still to endure an occasional humiliation from aristocratic morgue—from the exclusive pretensions of noble blood and ancestral honours—they take care to indemnify themselves largely by similar insolence at the expense of their less fortunate brethren, the working-classes. Indeed, were the latter to be asked which of the two classes, the higher or the middle, they ordinarily experience most courtesy from, they would unhesitatingly make answer, from the higher.

Nor is this class-insolence, this two-fold pride of blood and riches, confined to monarchical countries. It is as rife in republican Americas as in purse-proud, aristocratic England. In Spanish America both kinds of pride exist in full vigour; but that of caste, or blood, is carried to such excess as must render the excluded classes perfectly miserable all their lives. In the Free States even of republican America a man of colour dared not sit in the same part of a church or a theatre with the whites. Intermarriage between the two races was regarded with horror, and with difficulty could a clergyman be found to officiate at such a ceremony. In travelling, the people of colour must not enter the same carriages, nor (if in a steamboat) must they be seen in the same cabin as the whites. The negro-class, male and female, must travel in inferior trains by land, and sleep in inferior berths or upon deck when at sea or in excursions up and down the rivers. At places of public amusement they have their "coloured" seat and in the house of God their "coloured" gallery. In New Orleans and other cities in the South there are great numbers of coloured ladies of excellent education—ladies highly accomplished, and possessed, too, of great wealth, who lived in concubinage with white men, because they could not be legally married to them. There was a distinguished American general in the States who had several children, the offspring of such concubinage; and, with all his influence, he could not find admission into society for the members of his family. They and their like find barriers everywhere opposed to them.

It is true, these are not so much distinctions of wealth and pedigree, as distinctions of blood and race. But the principle of exclusiveness is the same. It is the exercise of injustice by the strong against the weak—the oppression of one class by another—a particular form or phase of slavery, which under any and every phase is anti-Christian and anti-human. Liberty and Christianity do not require a black man to marry a white woman, nor vice versá; but both liberty and Christianity forbid coercive laws against such marriages, and more especially do they repudiate and reprobate the system of exclusiveness and unnecessary insults so universally exer