THE FAMILY.
All modern philosophy converges to a single point--the overthrow of all
government, the substitution of the untrammelled "Sovereignty of the
Individual," for the Sovereignty of Society, and the inauguration of
anarchy. First domestic slavery, next religious institutions, then
separate property, then political government, and, finally, family
government and family relations, are to be swept away. This is the
distinctly avowed programme of all able abolitionists and socialists:
and towards this end the doctrines and the practices of the weakest and
most timid among them tend. Proudhon, and the French socialists
generally, avow this purpose in France, and Stephen Pearl Andrews
re-echoes it from America. The more numerous and timid class are
represented by Mr. Greeley and the Tribune, who would not "at once
rush," like French revolutionists, "with the explosive force of
escapement, point blank to the bull's eye of its final destiny," but
would inaugurate social conditions, that would gradually bring about
that result. Mr. Greeley does not propose to do away at once with
marriage, religion, private property, political government and parental
authority, but adopts the philosophy and the practices of Fourier, which
promise gradually to purify human nature, and fit it, in a few
generations, for that social millenium, into which the bolder and more
consistent Andrews urges society at once to plunge.
The Christian socialists are beautifully and energetically co-laborating
with the infidel socialists and abolitionists to bring about this
millenium. They also are divided into two parties. The one would wait
upon Providence--only help it a little, like Mr. Greeley--and permit our
poor old effete world to pass out of existence by gentle euthanasia. The
other and bolder party, feel themselves "called" as special instruments,
to give at once the coup de grace to the old world, and to usher in the
new golden age, of free love and free lands, of free women and free
negroes, of free children and free men.
We like the Northern socialist theoretical abolitionists--read their
speeches, essays, lectures and books, because they agree with us, that
their own form of society is a humbug and a failure; and in their
efforts, speculations and schemes to re-organize it, afford the most
beautiful, perfect and complete specimen of the reductio ad absurdum. A
lecture from Mr. Andrews on No-government, an Oneida den of incest, a
Greeley phalanstery, or a New York free love saloon, afford equally good
instances of this mode of demonstration by the absurdities which they
exhibit, and equally good proofs of the naturalness and necessity of
slavery, since such horrid abuses are everywhere the approved and
practiced outgrowth of free society. As all our thoughts, arguments,
proofs and demonstrations are suggested by or borrowed from the
abolitionists, it seems to us we ought to dedicate to them. The Tribune
very properly remarked that our Sociology was the first attempt of the
kind at the South. It ridiculed our ignorance, too, severely. It should
have recollected that were there no sickness there would be no
physicians. We assure the Tribune, we are quite a prodigy in these
matters for a Southern man. We have no social diseases, and therefore no
social doctors to write about them or cure them. Such diseases have been
rare: for Aristotle complains that there are no terms to express the
relations of husband and wife, or parent and child. These relations have
worked so smoothly in slave society to this day, that we in writing have
felt the same want of language of which Aristotle, more than two
thousand years ago, complained. You should invent such terms at the
North, if it be true, as Mr. Andrews states in italics, that there are
ten fugitives from Northern matrimony to one from Southern slavery--from
which he seems to infer very logically, that the necessity of abolishing
the family at the North, is ten times as great as that for abolishing
slavery at the South. He and you are experts, and we know it is
presumptuous in us to dispute what you say about your own society. Still
we are dead against your phalansteries and his love saloons. Gentlemen
and scholars, generally at the South, would as soon be caught studying
or practicing the black art, as in reading Owen or Fourier, or in
building phalansteries. For ourselves, like the Bastard in King John, we
learn these things, "not to deceive, but to avoid deceit." We have whole
files of infidel and abolition papers, like the Tribune, the Liberator
and Investigator. Fanny Wright, the Devil's Pulpit and the Devil's
Parson, Tom Paine, Owen, Voltaire, et id genus omne, are our daily
companions. Good people give our office a wide berth as they pass it,
and even the hens who loiter about it, have caught the infection of
Woman's Rights, for we saw but as few days ago a Shanghai cock under its
eaves hovering a brood of twenty chickens, whilst madam hen was
strutting about in as large a liberty as any Bloomer or wise woman of
the North.
Love and veneration for the family is with us not only a principle, but
probably a prejudice and a weakness. We were never two weeks at a time
from under the family roof, until we had passed middle life, and now
that our years almost number half a century, we have never been from
home for an interval of two months. And our historical reading, as well
as our habits of life, may have unfitted us to appreciate the communist
and fusion theories of Fanny Wright, Owen and Mr. Greely. In attempting
to vindicate and justify the ways of God and Nature, against the
progressiveness of Black Republicanism in America, and Red Republicanism
in Europe, we would forewarn the reader that we are a prejudiced
witness. We are the enthusiastic admirer of the social relations
exhibited in the histories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The social
relations established in Deuteronomy, and 25th chapter Leviticus, and as
practiced by the Jews to this day, elicit our unfeigned admiration and
approval. Moses is with us the Prince of Legislators, and the
twenty-fifth Leviticus the best of political platforms. The purity of
the family seems to be his paramount object.
Homer, too, especially in his Odyssey, charms and enchains us with his
beautiful descriptions of family felicity and family purity. As conquest
and commerce introduced wealth and corrupted morals and manners, the
family was corrupted and disrupted, as it is now, at the most commercial
points in the North. But we have only to pass over to Italy, and there,
from the earliest days of tradition until the extinction of liberty,
began by Sylla and Marius, and ended by Augustus, we find the family a
pure, a holy and sacred thing. From that era till slavery arose in the
South, the family never resumed its dignity and importance. Feudalism
did something to correct the loose morality of the Augustan Age, but it
adopted its colonial slavery, relaxed family ties, and never drew
together in sufficiently close connection and subordination, the
materials which nature dictates should form the human hive or social
circle.
Aristotle understood this subject thoroughly; and it seems to have been
generally so well comprehended in his day, that he takes little trouble
to explain and expound it. He commences his treatise on Politics and
Economics with the family, and discourses first of the slaves as a part
of the family. He assumes that social life is as natural to man as to
bees and herds; and that the family, including husband, wife, children,
and slaves, is the first and most natural development of that social
nature. As States are composed of families, and as a sound and healthy
whole cannot be formed of rotten parts, he devotes much of his treatise
to family education and government. Would that modern statesmen,
philosophers and politicians, would become practical like Aristotle, and
not attempt to build social and political edifices, until they were sure
of the soundness of the materials of which they would construct them. As
all human beings live for the greatest part of their lives in families,
it is all important that they should look to the wise arrangement of
this old and universal institution.
We wish to prove that the great movement in society, known under various
names, as Communism, Socialism, Abolitionism, Red Republicanism and
Black Republicanism, has one common object: the breaking up of all law
and government, and the inauguration of anarchy, and that the
destruction of the family is one of the means in which they all concur
to attain a common end. We shall quote only from Stephen Pearle Andrews,
because he is by far the ablest and best informed of American Socialists
and Reformers, and because he cites facts and authorities to show that
he presents truly the current thought and the general intention. Mr.
Andrews is a Massachusetts gentleman, who has lived at the South. He has
been an Abolition Lecturer. He is the disciple of Warren, who is the
disciple of Owen of Lanark and New Harmony. Owen and Warren are Socrates
and Plato, and he is the Great Stygarite, as far surpassing them, as
Aristotle surpassed Socrates and Plato. But it is not merely his
theories on which we rely; he cites historical facts that show that the
tendency and terminus of all abolition is to the sovereignty of the
individual, the breaking up of families, and no-government. He delivered
a series of lectures to the elite of New York on this subject, which met
with approbation, and from which we shall quote. He established, or
aided to establish, Free Love Villages, and headed a Free Love Saloon
in the city of New York, patronized and approved by the "Higher
classes." He is indubitably the philosopher and true exponent of
Northern Abolitionism. With this assertion, which none who read his
Science of Society we think will deny, we proceed to quote from his able
and beautiful lectures, embodied in a publication entitled "Science of
Society." Our first quotation is from his first lecture and the first
chapter of his work:
Every age is a remarkable one, no doubt, for those who live in it.
When immobility reigns most in human affairs, there is still
enough of movement to fix the attention, and even to excite the
wonder of those who are immediately in proximity with it. This
natural bias in favor of the period with which we have most to do,
is by no means sufficient, however, to account for the growing
conviction, on all minds, that the present epoch is a marked
transition from an old to a new order of things. The scattered
rays of the gray dawn of the new era date back, indeed, beyond the
lifetime of the present generation. The first streak of light that
streamed through the dense darkness of the old _regime_ was the
declaration by Martin Luther of the right of private judgment in
matters of conscience. The next, which shed terror upon the old
world, as a new portent of impending revolutions, was the denial,
by Hampden, Sidney, Cromwell, and others, of the divine right of
kings, and the assertion of inherent political rights in the
people themselves. This was followed by the American Declaration
of Independence, the establishment of a powerful Democratic
Republic in the western world upon the basis of that principle,
followed by the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, the
Re-action, and the apparent death in Europe of the Democratic
idea. Finally, in our day, comes the red glare of French
Socialism, at which the world is still gazing with uncertainty
whether it be some lurid and meteoric omen of fearful events, or
whether it be not the actual rising of the Sun of Righteousness,
with healing in His wings; for there are those who profoundly and
religiously believe that the solution of the social problem will
be the virtual descent of the New Jerusalem--the installation of
the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth.
First in the religious, then in the political, and finally in the
social relations of men, new doctrines have thus been broached,
which are full of promise to the hopeful, and full of alarm and
dismay to the timid and conservative. This distinction marks the
broadest division in the ranks of mankind. In church, and state,
and social life, the real parties are the Progressionists and the
Retrogressionists--those whose most brilliant imaginings are
linked with the future, and those whose sweetest remembrances bind
them in tender associations to the past. Catholic and Protestant,
Whig and Democrat, Anti-Socialist and Socialist, are terms which,
in their origin, correspond to this generic division; but no
sooner does a new classification take place than the parties thus
formed are again subdivided, on either hand, by the
ever-permeating tendency, on the one side toward freedom,
emancipation, and progress, and toward law, and order, and
immobility on the other.
Hitherto the struggle between conservatism and progress has seemed
doubtful. Victory has kissed the banner, alternately, of either
host. At length the serried ranks of conservatism falter. Reform,
so called, is becoming confessedly more potent than its
antagonist. The admission is reluctantly forced from pallid lips
that revolutions--political, social and religious--constitute the
programme of the coming age. Reform, so called, for weal or woe,
but yet Reform, must rule the hour. The older constitutions of
society have outlived their day. No truth commends itself more
universally to the minds of men now, than that thus set forth by
Carlyle: "There must be a new world if there is to be any world at
all. That human things in our Europe can ever return to the old
sorry routine, and proceed with any steadiness or continuance
there--this small hope is not now a tenable one. These days of
universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the ruin
is not to be total and final! It is a time to make the dullest man
consider, and ask himself, Whence he came? Whither he is bound? A
veritable 'New Era,' to the foolish as well as to the wise." Nor
is this state of things confined to Europe. The agitations in
America may be more peaceful, but they are not less profound. The
foundations of old beliefs and habits of thought are breaking up.
The old guarantees of order are fast falling away. A veritable
"new era" with us, too, is alike impending and inevitable.
So much to show the width and scope of the social revolution that is
contemplated as well by destructives as conservatives; for Mr. Carlyle
is like ourselves, and thinks society needs more government, screwing
up, instead of relaxing. He, too, is a socialist, but a conservative
socialist. He asserts, like Mr. Andrews, that society has failed, but
proposes a different mode of reconstruction. At the very moment we in
America were announcing the Failure of Free Society, he in Europe
proclaimed the 'Latter Day' of that Society. It was but a different mode
of expressing the same thought. Now we will show from this same lecture
of Mr. Andrews, that the annihilation of the Family is part of the
programme of Abolition. He says, page 31, in this same lecture:
Every variety of conscience, and every variety of deportment in
reference to this precise subject of love is already tolerated
among us. At one extreme of the scale stand the Shakers, who
abjure the connection of the sexes altogether. At the other
extremity stands the association of Perfectionists, at Oneida, who
hold and practice, and justify by the Scriptures, as a religious
dogma, what they denominate complex marriage, or the freedom of
love. We have, in this State, stringent laws against adultery and
fornication; but laws of that sort fall powerless, in America,
before the all-pervading sentiment of Protestantism, which
vindicates the freedom of conscience to all persons and in all
things, provided the consequences fall upon the parties
themselves. Hence the Oneida Perfectionists live undisturbed and
respected, in the heart of the State of New York, and in the face
of the world; and the civil government, true to the Democratic
principle, which is only the same principle in another
application, is little anxious to interfere with this breach of
its own ordinances, so long as they cast none of the consequences
of their conduct upon those who do not consent to bear them.
And, page 33, he says:
In general, however, Government still interferes with the marriage
and parental relations. Democracy in America has always proceeded
with due reference to the prudential motto, _festina lente_. In
France, at the time of the first Revolution, Democracy rushed with
the explosive force of escapement from centuries of compression,
point blank to the bull's eye of its final destiny, from which it
recoiled with such force that the stupid world has dreamed, for
half a century, that the vital principle of Democracy was dead. As
a logical sequence from Democratic principle, the legal obligation
of marriage was sundered, and the Sovereignty of the Individual
above the institution was vindicated.
Page 42:
I must apologize as well for the incompleteness as for the
apparent dogmatism of any brief exposition of this subject. I
assert that it is not only possible and rationally probable, but
that it is rigidly consequential upon the right understanding of
the constitution of man, that all government, in the sense of
involuntary restraint upon the Individual, or substantially all,
must finally cease, and along with it the whole complicated
paraphernalia and trumpery of Kings, Emperors, Presidents,
Legislatures, and Judiciary. I assert that the indicia of this
result abound in existing society, and that it is the instinctive
or intelligent perception of that fact by those who have not
bargained for so much, which gives origin and vital energy to the
re-action in church and state and social life. I assert that the
distance is less to-day forward from the theory and practice of
Government as it is in these United States, to the total
abrogation of all Government above that of the Individual, than it
is backward to the theory and practice of Government as Government
now is in the despotic countries of the old world.
The reader will thus see that Abolition contemplates the total overthrow
of the Family and all other existing social, moral, religious and
governmental institutions. We quote Mr. Andrews because he is 'longo
intervallo,' the ablest Abolition Philosopher. Many volumes would be
needed to display and expose the opinions of all the votaries of the New
Philosophy. But every man who sets to work honestly to discover truth,
will find at every step, that we have neither distorted nor exaggerated.
The Family is threatened, and all men North or South who love and revere
it, should be up and a doing.