IN WHAT ANTI-SLAVERY ENDS.
Mr. Carlyle very properly contends that abolition and all the other
social movements of the day, propose little or no government as the
moral panacea that is to heal and save a suffering world. Proudhon
expressly advocates anarchy; and Stephen Pearl Andrews, the ablest of
American socialistic and abolition philosophers, elaborately attacks all
existing social relations, and all legal and governmental restraints,
and proposes No-Government as their substitute. He is the author of the
Free Love experiment in New York, and a co-laborer and eulogist of
similar experiments in villages or settlements in Ohio, Long Island and
other places in the North and Northwest. He is a follower of Josiah
Warren, who was associated with Owen of Lanark at New Harmony. We do not
know that there is any essential difference between his system and that
which has been for many years past practically carried out in Oneida
county, New York, by the Perfectionists, who construe the Bible into
authority for the unrestrained indulgence of every sensual appetite. The
doctrines of Fourier, of Owen and Fanny Wright, and the other early
Socialists, all lead to No-Government and Free Love. 'Tis probable they
foresaw and intended this result, but did not suggest or propose it to a
world then too wicked and unenlightened to appreciate its beatific
purity and loveliness. The materials, as well as the proceedings of the
infidel, woman's rights, negro's rights, free-every thing and anti-every
school, headed and conducted in Boston, by Garrison, Parker, Phillips,
and their associate women and negroes, show that they too are busy with
"assiduous wedges" in loosening the whole frame of society, and
preparing for the glorious advent of Free Love and No-Government. All
the Infidel and Abolition papers in the North betray a similar tendency.
The Abolitionists of New York, headed by Gerrit Smith and Wm. Goodell,
are engaged in precisely the same projects, but being Christians, would
dignify Free Love and No-Government with the appellation of a Millenium.
Probably half the Abolitionists at the North expect a great social
revolution soon to occur by the advent of the Millenium. If they would
patiently await that event, instead of attempting to get it up
themselves, their delusions, however ridiculous, might at least be
innocuous. But these progressive Christian Socialists differ not at all
from the Infidel Socialists of Boston. They are equally intent and busy
in pulling down the priesthood, and abolishing or dividing all
property--seeing that whether the denouement be Free Love or a
Millenium, the destruction of all existing human relations and human
institutions is pre-requisite to their full fruition.
Many thousand as have been of late years the social experiments
attempting to practice community of property, of wives, children, &c.,
and numerous as the books inculcating and approving such practices, yet
the existence and growth of Mormonism is of itself stronger evidence
than all other of the tendency of modern free society towards
No-Government and Free Love. In the name of polygamy, it has practically
removed all restraints to the intercourse of sexes, and broken up the
Family. It promises, too, a qualified community of property and a
fraternal association of labor. It beats up monthly thousands of
recruits from free society in Europe and America, but makes not one
convert in the slaveholding South. Slavery is satisfied and
conservative. Abolition, finding that all existing legal, religious,
social and governmental institutions restrict liberty and occasion a
quasi slavery, is resolved not to stop short of the subversion of all
those institutions, and the inauguration of Free Love and No-Government.
The only cure for all this is for free society sternly to recognize
slavery as right in principle, and necessary in practice, with more or
less of modification, to the very existence of government, of property,
of religion, and of social existence.
We shall not attempt to reconcile the doctrines of the Socialists, which
propose to remove all legal restraints, with their denunciations of
Political Economy. Let Alone is the essence of Political Economy and the
whole creed of most of the Socialists. The Political Economists, Let
Alone, for a fair fight, for universal rivalry, antagonism, competition
and cannibalism. They say, the eating up the weaker members of society,
the killing them out by capital and competition, will improve the breed
of men and benefit society. They foresee the consequences of their
doctrine, and are consistent. Hobbes saw men devouring one another,
under their system, two hundred years ago, and we all see them similarly
engaged now. The Socialists promise that when society is wholly
disintegrated and dissolved, by inculcating good principles and "singing
fraternity over it," all men will co-operate, love, and help one
another.
They place men in positions of equality, rivalry, and antagonism, which
must result in extreme selfishness of conduct, and yet propose this
system as a cure for selfishness. To us their reasonings seem absurd.
Yet the doctrines so prevalent with Abolitionists and Socialists, of
Free Love and Free Lands, Free Churches, Free Women and Free
Negroes--of No-Marriage, No-Religion, No-Private Property, No-Law and
No-Government, are legitimate deductions, if not obvious corollaries
from the leading and distinctive axiom of political economy--Laissez
Faire, or let alone.
All the leading Socialists and Abolitionists of the North, we think,
agree with Fanny Wright, that the gradual changes which have taken place
in social organization from domestic slavery to praedial serfdom and
thence to the present system of free and competitive society, have been
mere transitive states, each placing the laborer in a worse condition
than that of absolute slavery, yet valuable as preparing the way for a
new and more perfect social state. They value the present state of
society the more highly because it is intolerable, and must the sooner
usher in a Millenium or Utopia.