THE "COUP DE GRACE" TO ABOLITION.
The Abolitionists are all willing to admit that free society has utterly
failed in Europe, but will assign two reasons for that failure--"Excess
of population, and want of equality and liberty."
Were the population of England doubled, the labor required to support
that population would be lessened, could all labor and expenses be
supported alike; because the association and division of labor might be
rendered more perfect, and the expenses of a single family, or single
individual, might be divided among and borne by many. The Socialists and
Abolitionists understand this. When one family has to support its own
school, its own mill, its own mechanics, its own doctor, parson, &c.,
living is expensive; but where these and other expenses are divided
among many, living becomes cheap; hence it is far less laborious to live
in a densely settled country than in a sparsely settled one, if labor
and expenses can be equally divided. The soil of England will readily
support double its population, if its products be not wasted in luxury,
in feeding deer, and game, and horses. England has not attained that
density of population which enables men to live by the least amount of
labor. Her laboring population has been thinned and labor rendered
dearer and scarcer, by emigration, of late years, to America, California
and Australia--yet, in the winter of 1854, there was a general outbreak
and riot of her operatives, because a fall in prices occasioned a large
number of her factories to stop work, and turn their hands out of
employment. This happens every day in free society, from the bankruptcy
of employers, or from the glut of markets and fall of prices. We will
add, that a meeting of the working men of New York, in the Park,
asserted that there were 50,000 working men and women, in that city, out
of employment last winter.
The competitive system (so injurious to the laboring class) is carried
out with less exception or restriction in America than in Europe. Hence,
considering the sparseness of our population, the laboring class are
worse off in New York, Philadelphia and Boston, than in London,
Manchester or Paris. And this begets more Socialists in the higher
classes, and more mobs, riots and trade-unions, with the laborers, than
in Europe.
Finally, if it be excess of numbers, or want of liberty, that occasions
the failure of free society, why are our Abolitionists and Socialists
so hot and so active in upsetting and re-organizing society? They have
pronounced, with entire unanimity, that free society is intolerable,
whether a country be densely or sparsely settled.
The Abolitionists boast, that lands are dearer and labor cheaper in free
than in slave society. Either proposition contains the admission that
free laborers work more for others and less for themselves than
slaves--in effect, that they are less free than slaves. The profits of
land are what the land-owner appropriates of the results of work of the
laborer. Where he appropriates most, and leaves the laborer least, there
lands are dearest, labor cheapest, and laborers least free. In Europe,
lands sell much higher than at the North; hence, laborers are less free
in fact than at the North. In the North they sell higher than in the
South, because the slaves consume more of the results of their own labor
than laborers at the North, and leave less profit to the land-owner. The
high price of land is, in the general, an unerring indication of the
poverty and actual slavery of the laboring class. Its low price, equally
proves that the laborers, whether called slaves or freemen, work more
for themselves, and less for the land-owners, than where lands are dear.
In settled countries, where all the lands are appropriated, this theory
is undeniable and irrefutable.
As this is a short chapter, we take the opportunity to apologize and
account for our discursive, immethodical and unartistic manner.
In the first place, the character of the enemy we have to contend with
prevents anything like regular warfare. They are divided into hundreds
of little guerrilla bands of isms, each having its peculiar partizan
tactics, and we are compelled to vary our mode of attack from regular
cannonade to bush-fighting, to suit the occasion.
Again, we practiced as a jury lawyer for twenty-five years, and thereby
acquired an inveterate habit of cumulation and iteration, and of various
argument and illustration. But, at the same time, we learned how "to
make out our case," and to know when it is "made out." The lawyer who
observed the Unities in an argument before a jury would be sure to lose
his cause; and now the world is our jury, who are going to bring in a
verdict against free society of "guilty."
We admire not the pellucid rivulet, that murmurs and meanders, in
cramped and artificial current, through the park and gardens of the
nobleman; but we do admire the flooded and swollen Mississippi, whose
turbid waters, in their majestic course, sweep along upon their bosom,
with equal composure, the occupants of the hen-roost and the poultry
yard, the flocks, the herds, the crops, the uprooted forest, and the
residences of man. The Exhaustive, not the Artistic, is what we would
aspire to. And yet, the Exhaustive may be the highest art of argument.
The best mode, we think, of writing, is that in which facts, and
argument, and rhetoric, and wit, and sarcasm, succeed each other with
rapid iteration.
Intonuere poli, et crebris micat ignibus aether!
Again, Artistic execution is un-English. It neither suits their minds
nor their tastes. Discursiveness and prurient exuberancy of thought and
suggestion, they often possess, but always fail when they attempt a
literary or other work of Art. Indeed, we have a strong suspicion that
Art went out of the world about the time the Baconian Philosophy came
in.
A continuous argument, without pause or break, on a subject profoundly
metaphysical, equally fatigues the writer and the reader. Nobody likes
it, and very few read it. "Desipere in loco" is not only a very
agreeable maxim to the author, but a very wise and prudent one.
Lastly. Like Porthos, when "we have an idea," we are at once seized with
a feverish anxiety to communicate it, and we think it better to break in
on the regular thread of our discourse, and do so at once, than to spoil
our whole discourse by having our minds occupied with two subjects at a
time.
Another idea strikes us. As yet we hardly aspire to the dignity of
authorship. We indulge in abandon, because, as a writer, we have no
reputation to jeopard or to lose. But, should this book take, we will
mount the antithetical stilts of auctorial dignity--write a book as
stale and dry as "the remainder biscuit after a long voyage," and as
free from originality, wit, thought or suggestiveness, as the Queen's
Speech, the President's Message, or a debate in the United States
Senate. We do not as yet bore the world with "respectable stupidity,"
because our position does not authorize it.