THE MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY OF RACES IS NOT THE RESULT OF
POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS.
Antipathy of races--Results of their mixture--The scientific axiom of
the absolute equality of men, but an extension of the
political--Its fallacy--Universal belief in unequal endowment of
races--The moral and intellectual diversity of races not
attributable to institutions--Indigenous institutions are the
expression of popular sentiments; when foreign and imported, they
never prosper--Illustrations: England and France--Roman
Empire--European Colonies--Sandwich Islands--St. Domingo--Jesuit
missions in Paraguay.
The idea of an innate and permanent difference in the moral and mental
endowments of the various groups of the human species, is one of the
most ancient, as well as universally adopted, opinions. With few
exceptions, and these mostly in our own times, it has formed the basis
of almost all political theories, and has been the fundamental maxim of
government of every nation, great or small. The prejudices of country
have no other cause; each nation believes in its own superiority over
its neighbors, and very often different parts of the same nation regard
each other with contempt. There seems to exist an instinctive antipathy
among the different races, and even among the subdivisions of the same
race, of which none is entirely exempt, but which acts with the greatest
force in the least civilized or least civilizable. We behold it in the
characteristic suspiciousness and hostility of the savage; in the
isolation from foreign influence and intercourse of the Chinese and
Japanese; in the various distinctions founded upon birth in more
civilized communities, such as castes, orders of nobility and
aristocratic privileges.[61] Not even a common religion can extinguish
the hereditary aversion of the Arab[62] to the Turk, of the Kurd to the
Nestorian of Syria; or the bitter hostility of the Magyar and Sclave,
who, without intermingling, have inhabited the same country for
centuries. But as the different types lose their purity and become
blended, this hostility of race abates; the maxim of absolute and
permanent inequality is first discussed, then doubted. A man of mixed
race or caste will not be apt to admit disparity in his double ancestry.
The superiority of particular types, and their consequent claims to
dominion, find fewer advocates. This dominion is stigmatized as a
tyrannical usurpation of power.[63] The mixture of castes gives rise to
the political axiom that all men are equal, and, therefore, entitled to
the same rights. Indeed, since there are no longer any distinct
hereditary classes, none can justly claim superior merit and privileges.
But this assertion, which is true only where a complete fusion has taken
place, is applied to the whole human race--to all present, past, and
future generations. The political axiom of equality which, like the bag
of Æolus, contains so many tempests, is soon followed by the scientific.
It is said--and the more heterogeneous the ethnical elements of a
nation are, the more extensively the theory gains ground--that, "all
branches of the human family are endowed with intellectual capacities of
the same nature, which, though in different stages of development, are
all equally susceptible of improvement." This is not, perhaps, the
precise language, but certainly the meaning. Thus, the Huron, by proper
culture, might become the equal of the Englishman and Frenchman. Why,
then, I would ask, did he never, in the course of centuries, invent the
art of printing or apply the power of steam; why, among the warriors of
his tribe, has there never arisen a Cæsar or a Charlemagne, among his
bards and medicine-men, a Homer or a Hippocrates?
These questions are generally met by advancing the influence of climate,
local circumstances, etc. An island, it is said, can never be the
theatre of great social and political developments in the same measure
as a continent; the natives of a southern clime will not display the
energy of those of the north; seacoasts and large navigable rivers will
promote a civilization which could never have flourished in an inland
region;--and a great deal more to the same purpose. But all these
ingenious and plausible hypotheses are contradicted by facts. The same
soil and the same climate have been visited, alternately, by barbarism
and civilization. The degraded fellah is charred by the same sun which
once burnt the powerful priest of Memphis; the learned professor of
Berlin lectures under the same inclement sky that witnessed the miseries
of the savage Finn.
What is most curious is, that while the belief of equality may influence
institutions and manners, there is not a nation, nor an individual but
renders homage to the contrary sentiment. Who has not heard of the
distinctive traits of the Frenchman, the German, the Spaniard, the
English, the Russ. One is called sprightly and volatile, but brave; the
other is sober and meditative; a third is noted for his gravity; a
fourth is known by his coldness and reserve, and his eagerness of gain;
a fifth, on the contrary, is notorious for reckless expense. I shall not
express any opinion upon the accuracy of these distinctions, I merely
point out that they are made daily and adopted by common consent. The
same has been done in all ages. The Roman of Italy distinguished the
Roman of Greece by the epithet _Græculus_, and attributed to him, as
characteristic peculiarities, want of courage and boastful loquacity. He
laughed at the colonist of Carthage, whom he pretended to recognize
among thousands by his litigious spirit and bad faith. The Alexandrians
passed for wily, insolent, and seditious. Yet the doctrine of equality
was as universally received among the Romans of that period as it is
among ourselves. If, then, various nations display qualities so
different; if some are eager for war and glory; others, lovers of their
ease and comfort, it follows that their destinies must be very diverse.
The strongest will act in the great tragedy of history the roles of
kings and heroes, the weaker will be content with the humbler parts.
I do not believe that the ingenuity of our times has succeeded in
reconciling the universally adopted belief in the special character of
each nation with the no less general conviction that they are all equal.
Yet this contradiction is very flagrant, the more so as its partisans
are not behindhand in extolling the superiority of the Anglo-Saxons of
North America over all the other nations of the same continent. It is
true that they ascribe that superiority to the influence of political
institutions. But they will hardly contest the characteristic aptitude
of the countrymen of Penn and Washington, to establish wherever they go
liberal forms of government, and their still more valuable ability to
preserve them, when once established. Is not this a very high
prerogative allotted to that branch of the human family? the more
precious, since so few of the groups that have ever inhabited the globe
possessed it.
I know that my opponents will not allow me an easy victory. They will
object to me the immense potency of manners and institutions; they will
show me how much the spirit of the government, by its inherent and
irresistible force, influences the development of a nation; how vastly
different will be its progress when fostered by liberty or crushed by
despotism. This argument, however, by no means invalidates my position.
Political institutions can have but two origins: either they emanate
from the people which is to be governed by them, or they are the
invention of a foreign nation, by whom they are imposed, or from whom
they are copied.
In the former case, the institutions are necessarily moulded upon the
instincts and wants of the people; and if, through carelessness or
ignorance, they are in aught incompatible with either, such defects will
soon be removed or remedied. In every independent community the law may
be said to emanate from the people; for though they have not apparently
the power of promulgating it, it cannot be applicable to them unless it
is consonant with their views and sentiments: it must be the reflex of
the national character.[64] The wise law-giver, to whose superior genius
his countrymen seem solely indebted, has but given a voice to the wants
and desires of all. The mere theorist, like Draco, finds his code a dead
letter, and destined soon to give place to the institutions of the more
judicious philosopher who would give to his compatriots "not the best
laws possible, but such only as they were capable of receiving." When
Charles I., guided by the fatal counsels of the Earl of Strafford,
attempted to curb the English nation under the yoke of absolutism, king
and minister were treading the bloody quagmire of theories. But when
Ferdinand the Catholic ordered those terrible, but, in the then
condition of the nation, politically necessary persecutions of the
Spanish Moors, or when Napoleon re-established religion and authority in
France, and flattered the military spirit of the nation--both these
potentates had rightly understood the genius of their subjects, and were
building upon a solid and practical foundation.
False institutions, often beautiful on paper, are those which are not
conformed to the national virtues _or failings_, and consequently
unsuitable to the country, though perhaps perfectly practicable and
highly useful in a neighboring state. Such institutions, were they
borrowed from the legislation of the angels, will produce nothing but
discord and anarchy. Others, on the contrary, which the theorist will
eschew, and the moralist blame in many points, or perhaps throughout,
may be the best adapted to the community. Lycurgus was no theorist; his
laws were in strict accordance with the spirit and manners of his
countrymen.[65] The Dorians of Sparta were few in number, valiant, and
rapacious; false institutions would have made them but petty
villains--Lycurgus changed them into heroic brigands.[66]
The influence of laws and political institutions is certainly very
great; they preserve and invigorate the genius of a nation, define its
objects, and help to attain them; but though they may develop powers,
they cannot create them where they do not already exist. They first
receive their imprint from the nation, and then return and confirm it.
In other words, it is the nation that fashions the laws, before the
laws, in turn, can fashion the nation. Another proof of this fact are
the changes and modifications which they undergo in the course of time.
I have already said above, that in proportion as nations advance in
civilization, and extend their territory and power, their ethnical
character, and, with it, their instincts, undergo a gradual alteration.
New manners and new tendencies prevail, and soon give rise to a series
of modifications, the more frequent and radical as the influx of blood
becomes greater and the fusion more complete.
England, where the ethnical changes have been slower and less
considerable than in any other European country, preserves to this day
the basis of the social system of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. The municipal organization of the times of the Plantagenets
and the Tudors flourishes in almost all its ancient vigor. There is the
same participation of the nobility in the government, and the same
manner of composing that nobility; the same respect for ancient
families, united to an appreciation of those whose merits raise them
above their class. Since the accession of James I., and still more
since the union, in Queen Anne's reign, there has indeed been an influx
of Scotch and Irish blood; foreign nations have also, though
imperceptibly, furnished their contingent to the mixture; alterations
have consequently become more frequent of late, but without, as yet,
touching the original spirit of the constitution.
In France, the ethnical elements are much more numerous, and their
mixtures more varied; and there it has repeatedly happened that the
principal power of the state passed suddenly from the hands of one race
to those of another. Changes, rather than modifications, have therefore
taken place in the social and political system; and the changes were
abrupt or radical, in proportion as these races were more or less
dissimilar. So long as the north of France, where the Germanic element
prevailed, preponderated in the policy of the country, the fabric of
feudalism, or rather its inform remains, maintained their ground. After
the expulsion of the English in the fifteenth century, the provinces of
the centre took the lead. Their efforts, under the guidance of Charles
VII., had recently restored the national independence, and the
Gallo-Roman blood naturally predominated in camp and council. From this
time dates the introduction of the taste for military life and foreign
conquests, peculiar to the Celtic race, and the tendency to concentrate
and consolidate the sovereign authority, which characterized the Roman.
The road being thus prepared, the next step towards the establishment of
absolute power was made at the end of the sixteenth century, by the
Aquitanian followers of Henry IV., who had still more of the Roman than
of the Celtic blood in their veins. The centralization of power,
resulting from the ascendency of the southern populations, soon gave
Paris an overweening preponderance, and finally made it, what it now is,
the sovereign of the state. This great capital, this modern Babel, whose
population is a motley compound of all the most varied ethnical
elements, no longer had any motive to love or respect any tradition or
peculiar tendency, and, coming to a complete rupture with the past,
hurried France into a series of political and social experiments of
doctrines the most remote from, and repulsive to, the ancient customs
and traditional tendencies of the realm.
These examples seem to me sufficient to prove that political
institutions, when not imposed by foreign influence, take their mould
from the national character, not only in the first place, but throughout
all subsequent changes. Let us now examine the second case, when a
foreign code is, _nolens volens_, forced upon a nation by a superior
power.
There are few instances of such attempts. Indeed, they were never made
on a grand scale, by any truly sagacious governments of either ancient
or modern times. The Romans were too politic to indulge in such
hazardous experiments. Alexander, before them, had never ventured it,
and his successors, convinced, either by reason or instinct, of the
futility of such efforts, had been contented to reign, like the
conqueror of Darius, over a vast mosaic of nations, each of which
retained its own habits, manners, laws, and administrative forms, and,
at least so long as it preserved its ethnical identity, resembled its
fellow-subjects in nothing but submission to the same fiscal and
military regulations.
There were, it is true, among the nations subdued by the Romans, some
whose codes contained practices so utterly repugnant to their masters,
that the latter could not possibly have tolerated them. Such were the
human sacrifices of the Druids, which were, indeed, visited with the
severest penalties. But the Romans, with all their power, never
succeeded in completely extirpating this barbarous rite. In the
Narbonnese, the victory was easy, for the Gallic population had been
almost completely replaced by Roman colonists; but the more intact
tribes of the interior provinces made an obstinate resistance; and, in
the peninsula of Brittany, where, in the fourth century, a British
colony re-imported the ancient instincts with the ancient blood, the
population, in spite of the Romans, continued, either from patriotism or
veneration for their ancient traditions, to butcher fellow-beings on
their altars, as often as they could elude the vigilance of their
masters. All revolts began with the restoration of this fearful feature
of the national creed, and even Christianity could not entirely efface
its traces, until after protracted and strenuous efforts. As late as the
seventeenth century, the shipwrecked were murdered, and wrecks plundered
in all the maritime provinces where the Kimric blood had preserved
itself unmixed. These barbarous customs were in accordance with the
manners of a race which, not being yet sufficiently admixed, still
remained true to its irrepressible instincts.
One characteristic of European civilization is its intolerance.
Conscious of its pre-eminence, we are prone to deny the existence of any
other, or, at least, to consider it as the standard of all. We look with
supreme contempt upon all nations that are not within its pale, and when
they fall under our influence, we attempt to convert them to our views
and modes of thinking. Institutions which we know to be good and useful,
but which persuasion fails to propagate among nations to whose instincts
they are foreign, we force upon them by the power of our arms. Where are
the results? Since the sixteenth century, when the European spirit of
discovery and conquest penetrated to the east, it does not seem to have
operated the slightest change in the manners and mode of existence of
the populations which it subjected.
I have already adduced the example of British India. All the other
European possessions present the same spectacle. The aborigines of Java,
though completely subjugated by the Dutch, have not yet made the first
step towards embracing the manners of their conquerors. Java, at this
day, preserves the social regulations of the time of its independence.
In South America, where Spain ruled with unrestrained power for
centuries, what effect has it produced? The ancient empires, it is true,
are no longer; their traces, even, are almost obliterated. But while the
native has not risen to the level of his conqueror, the latter has been
degraded by the mixture of blood.[67] In the North, a different method
has been pursued, but with results equally negative; nay, in the eyes
of philanthropy, more deplorable; for, while the Spanish Indians have
at least increased in numbers,[68] and even mixed with their masters, to
the Red-Man of the North, the contact with the Anglo-Saxon race has been
death. The feeble remnants of these wretched tribes are fast
disappearing, and disappearing as uncivilized, as uncivilizable, as
their ancestors. In Oceanica, the same observation holds good. The
number of aborigines is daily diminishing. The European may disarm them,
and prevent them from doing him injury, but change them he cannot.
Where-ever he is master, they no longer eat one another, but they fill
themselves with firewater, and this novel species of brutishness is all
they learn of European civilization.
There are, indeed, two governments framed by nations of a different
race, after our models: that of the Sandwich Islands, and that of St.
Domingo. A glance at these two countries will complete the proof of the
futility of any attempts to give to a nation institutions not suggested
by its own genius.
In the Sandwich Islands, the representative system shines with full
lustre. We there find an Upper House, a Lower House, a ministry who
govern, and a king who reigns; nothing is wanted. Yet all this is mere
decoration; the wheel-work that moves the whole machine, the
indispensable motive power, is the corps of missionaries. To them alone
belongs the honor of finding the ideas, of presenting them, and carrying
them through, either by their personal influence over their neophytes,
or, if need be, by threats. It may be doubted, however, whether the
missionaries, if they had no other instruments but the king and
chambers, would not, after struggling for a while against the inaptitude
of their pupils, find themselves compelled to take a more direct, and,
consequently, more apparent part in the management of affairs. This
difficulty is obviated by the establishment of a ministry composed of
Europeans, or half-bloods. Between them and the missionaries, all public
affairs are prearranged; the rest is only for show. King Kamehameha III.
is, it seems, a man of ability. For his own account, he has abandoned
tattooing, and although he has not yet succeeded in dissuading all his
courtiers from this agreeable practice, he enjoys the satisfaction of
seeing their countenances adorned with comparatively slight designs. The
mass of the nation, the country nobility and common people, persist upon
this as all other points, in the ancient ideas and customs.[69] Still, a
variety of causes tend to daily increase the European population of the
Isles. The proximity of California makes them a point of great interest
to the far-seeing energy of our nations. Runaway sailors, and mutineers,
are no longer the only white colonists; merchants, speculators,
adventurers of all sorts, collect there in considerable numbers, build
houses, and become permanent settlers. The native population is
gradually becoming absorbed in the mixture with the whites. It is highly
probable that, ere long, the present representative form of government
will be superseded by an administration composed of delegates from one
or all of the great maritime powers.
Of one thing I feel firmly convinced, that these imported institutions
will take firm root in the country, but the day of their final triumph,
by a necessary synchronism, will be that of the extinction of the native
race.
In St. Domingo, national independence is intact. There are no
missionaries exercising absolute, though concealed, control, no foreign
ministry governing in the European spirit; everything is left to the
genius and inspiration of the population. In the Spanish part of the
island, this population consists of mulattoes. I shall not speak of
them. They seem to imitate, in some fashion, the simplest and easiest
features of our civilization. Like all half-breeds, they have a tendency
to assimilate with that branch of their genealogy which does them most
honor. They are, therefore, capable of practising, in some degree, our
usages. The absolute question of the capacity of races cannot be studied
among them. Let us cross the mountain ridge which separates the republic
of Dominica from the empire of Hayti.
There we find institutions not only similar to ours, but founded upon
the most recent maxims of our political wisdom. All that, since sixty
years, the voice of the most refined liberalism has proclaimed in the
deliberative assemblies of Europe, all that the most zealous friends of
the freedom and dignity of man have written, all the declarations of
rights and principles, have found an echo on the banks of Artibonite. No
trace of Africa remains in the _written_ laws, or the _official_
language; the recollections of the land of Ham are _officially_ expunged
from every mind; once more, the institutions are completely European.
Let us now examine how they harmonize with the manners.
What a contrast! The manners are as depraved, as beastly, as ferocious
as in Dahomey[70] or the country of the Fellatahs. The same barbarous
love of ornament, combined with the same indifference to form; beauty
consists in color, and provided a garment is of gaudy red, and adorned
with imitation gold, taste is little concerned with useless attention to
materials or fitness; and as for cleanliness, this is a superfluity for
which no one cares. You desire an audience with some high functionary:
you are ushered into the presence of an athletic negro, stretched on a
wooden bench, his head wrapped in a dirty, tattered handkerchief, and
surmounted by a three-cornered hat, profusely decorated with gold. The
general apparel consists of an embroidered coat (without suitable
nether-garments), a huge sword, and slippers. You converse with this
mass of flesh, and are anxious to discover what ideas can occupy a mind
under so unpromising an exterior. You find an intellect of the lowest
order combined with the most savage pride, which can be equalled only by
as profound and incurable a laziness. If the individual before you opens
his mouth, he will retail all the hackneyed common-places that the
papers have wearied you with for the last half century. This barbarian
knows them by heart; he has very different interests, different
instincts; he has no ideas of his own. He will talk like Baron Holbach,
reason like Grimm, and at the bottom has no serious care except chewing
tobacco, drinking spirits, butchering his enemies, and propitiating his
sorcerers. The rest of the time he sleeps.
The state is divided into two factions, not separated by incompatibility
of politics, but of color--the negroes and the mulattoes. The latter,
doubtless, are superior in intelligence, as I have already remarked with
regard to the Dominicans. The European blood has modified the nature of
the African, and in a community of whites, with good models constantly
before their eyes, these men might be converted into useful members of
society. But, unfortunately, the superiority of numbers belongs at
present to the negroes, and these, though removed from Africa by several
generations, are the same as in their native clime. Their supreme
felicity is idleness; their supreme reason, murder. Among the two
divisions of the island the most intense hatred has always prevailed.
The history of independent Hayti is nothing but a long series of
massacres: massacres of mulattoes by the negroes, when the latter were
strongest; of the negroes by the mulattoes, when the power was in their
hands. The institutions, with all their boasted liberality and
philanthropy, are of no use whatever. They sleep undisturbedly and
impotently upon the paper on which they were written, and the savage
instincts of the population reign supreme. Conformably to the law of
nature which I pointed out before, the negro, who belongs to a race
exhibiting little aptitude for civilization, entertains the most
profound horror for all other races. Thus we see the Haytien negroes
energetically repel the white man from their territory, and forbid him
even to enter it; they would also drive out the mulattoes, and
contemplate their ultimate extermination. Hostility to the foreigner is
the _primum mobile_ of their local policy. Owing to the innate laziness
of the race, agriculture is abandoned, industry not known even by name,
commerce drivelling; misery prevents the increase of the population,
while continual wars, insurrections, and military executions diminish it
continually. The inevitable and not very remote consequence of such a
condition of things is to convert into a desert a country whose
fertility and natural resources enriched generations of planters, which
in exports and commercial activity surpassed even Cuba.[71]
These examples of St. Domingo and the Sandwich Islands seem to me
conclusive. I cannot, however, forbear, before definitely leaving the
subject, from mentioning another analogous fact, the peculiar character
of which greatly confirms my position. I allude to the attempts of the
Jesuit missionaries to civilize the natives of Paraguay.[72]
These missionaries, by their exalted intelligence and self-sacrificing
courage, have excited universal admiration; and the most decided enemies
of their order have never refused them an unstinted tribute of praise.
If foreign institutions have ever had the slightest chance of success
with a nation, these assuredly had it, based as they were upon the
power of religious feelings, and supported and applied with a tact as
correct as it was refined. The fathers were of the pretty general
opinion that barbarism was to nations what childhood is to the
individual, and that the more savage and untutored we find a people, the
younger we may conclude them to be. To educate their neophytes to
adolescence, they therefore treated them like children. Their government
was as firm in its views and commands as it was mild and affectionate in
its forms. The aborigines of the American continent have generally a
tendency to republicanism; a monarchy or aristocracy is rarely found
among them, and then in a very restricted form. The Guaranis of Paraguay
did not differ, in this respect, from their congeners. By a happy
circumstance, however, these tribes displayed rather more intelligence
and less ferocity than their neighbors, and seemed capable, to some
extent, of conceiving new wants and adopting new ideas. About one
hundred and twenty thousand souls were collected in the villages of the
missions, under the guidance of the fathers. All that experience, daily
study, and active charity could teach the Jesuits, was employed for the
benefit of their pupils; incessant efforts were made to hasten success,
without hazarding it by rashness. In spite of all these cares, however,
it was soon felt that the most absolute authority over the neophytes
could hardly constrain them to persist in the right path, and occasions
were not wanting that revealed the little real solidity of the
edifice.[73]
When the measures of Count Aranda deprived Paraguay of its pious and
skilful civilizers, the sad truth appeared in complete light. The
Guaranis, deprived of their spiritual guides, refused all confidence in
the lay directors sent them by the Spanish crown. They showed no
attachment to their new institutions. Their taste for savage life
revived, and at present there are but thirty-seven little villages
still vegetating on the banks of the Parana, the Paraguay, and Uraguay,
and these contain a considerable nucleus of half-breed population. The
rest have returned to the forest, and live there in as savage a state as
the western tribes of the same stock, the Guaranis and Cirionos. I will
not say that the deserters have readopted their ancient manners
completely, but there is little trace left of the pious missionaries'
labors, and this because it is given to no human race to be oblivious of
its instincts, nor to abandon the path in which the Creator has placed
them.
It may be supposed, had the Jesuits continued to direct their missions
in Paraguay, that their efforts, assisted by time, would have been
crowned with better success. I am willing to concede this, but on one
condition only, always the same: that a group of Europeans would
gradually have settled in the country under the protection of the Jesuit
directors. These would have modified, and finally completely transformed
the native blood, and a state would have been formed, bearing probably
an aboriginal name, whose inhabitants might have prided themselves upon
descending from autochthonic ancestors, though as completely belonging
to Europe as the institutions by which they might be governed.
FOOTNOTES:
[61] The author of _Democracy in America_ (vol. ii. book 3, ch. 1),
speculating upon the total want of sympathy among the various classes of
an aristocratic community, says: "Each caste has its own opinions,
feelings, rights, manners, and mode of living. The members of each caste
do not resemble the rest of their fellow-citizens; they do not think and
feel in the same manner, and believe themselves a distinct race.... When
the chroniclers of the Middle Ages, who all belonged to the aristocracy
by birth and education, relate the tragical end of a noble, their grief
flows apace; while they tell, with the utmost indifference, of massacres
and tortures inflicted on the common people. In this they were actuated
by an _instinct_ rather than by a passion, for they felt no habitual
hatred or systematic disdain for the people: war between the several
classes of the community was not yet declared." The writer gives
extracts from Mme. de Sevigné's letters, displaying, to use his own
words, "a cruel jocularity which, in our day, the harshest man writing
to the most insensible person of his acquaintance would not venture to
indulge in; and yet Madame de Sevigné was not selfish or cruel; she was
passionately attached to her children, and ever ready to sympathize with
her friends, and she treated her servants and vassals with kindness and
indulgence." "Whence does this arise?" asks M. De Tocqueville; "have we
really more sensibility than our forefathers?" When it is recollected,
as has been pointed out in a previous note, that the nobility of France
were of Germanic, and the peasantry of Celtic origin, we will find in
this an additional proof of the correctness of our author's theory.
Thanks to the revolution, the barriers that separated the various ranks
have been torn down, and continual intermixture has blended the blood of
the Frankish noble and of the Gallic boor. Wherever this fusion has not
yet taken place, or but imperfectly, M. De Tocqueville's remarks still
apply.--H.
[62] The spirit of clanship is so strong in the Arab tribes, and their
instinct of ethnical isolation so powerful, that it often displays
itself in a rather odd manner. A traveller (Mr. Fulgence Fresnel, if I
am not mistaken) relates that at Djidda, where morality is at a rather
low ebb, the same Bedouine who cannot resist the slightest pecuniary
temptation, would think herself forever dishonored, if she were joined
in lawful wedlock to the Turk or European, to whose embrace she
willingly yields while she despises him.
[63]
The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of man, and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton.
SHELLEY, _Queen Mab_.
[64] Montesquieu expresses a similar idea, in his usual epigrammatic
style. "The customs of an enslaved people," says he, "are a part of
their servitude; those of a free people, a part of their
liberty."--_Esprit des Lois_, b. xix. c. 27.--H.
[65] "A great portion of the peculiarities of the Spartan constitution
and their institutions was assuredly of ancient Doric origin, and must
have been rather given up by the other Dorians, than newly invented and
instituted by the Spartans."--_Niebuhr's Ancient History_, vol. i. p.
306.--H.
[66] See note on page 121.
[67] The amalgamation of races in South America must indeed be
inconceivable. "I find," says Alex. von Humboldt, in 1826, "by several
statements, that if we estimate the population of the whole of the
Spanish colonies at fourteen or fifteen millions of souls, there are, in
that number, at most, _three_ millions of pure whites, including about
200,000 Europeans." (_Pers. Nar._, vol. i. p. 400.) Of the progress
which this mongrel population have made in civilization, I cannot give a
better idea than by an extract from Dr. Tschudi's work, describing the
mode of ploughing in some parts of Chili. "If a field is to be tilled,
it is done by two natives, who are furnished with long poles, pointed at
one end. The one thrusts his pole, pretty deeply, and in an oblique
direction, into the earth, so that it forms an angle with the surface of
the ground. The other Indian sticks his pole in, at a little distance,
and also obliquely, and he forces it beneath that of his fellow-laborer,
so that the first pole lies, as it were, upon the second. The first
Indian then presses on his pole, and makes it work on the other, as a
lever on its fulcrum, and the earth is thrown up by the point of the
pole. Thus they gradually advance, until the whole field is furrowed by
this laborious process." (_Dr. Tschudi, Travels in Peru, during the
years 1838-1842._ London, 1847, p. 14.) I really do not think that a
counterpart to this could be found, except, perhaps, in the manner of
working the mines all over South America. Both Darwin and Tschudi speak
of it with surprise. Every pound of ore is brought out of the shafts on
men's shoulders. The mines are drained of the water accumulating in
them, in the same manner, by means of water-tight bags. Dr. Tschudi
describes the process employed for the amalgamation of the quicksilver
with the silver ore. It is done by causing them to be trodden together
by horses', or human feet. Not only is this method attended with
incredible waste of material, and therefore very expensive, but it soon
kills the horses employed in it, while the men contract the most
fearful, and, generally, incurable diseases! (_Op. cit._, p.
331-334.)--H.
[68] A. von Humboldt, _Examen critique de l'Histoire et de la Géographie
du N. C._, vol. ii. p. 129-130.
The same opinion is expressed by Mr. Humboldt in his _Personal
Narrative_. London, 1852, vol. i. p. 296.--H.
[69] Speaking of the habit of tattooing among the South Sea Islanders,
Mr. Darwin says that even girls who had been brought up in missionaries'
houses, could not be dissuaded from this practice, though in everything
else, they seemed to have forgotten the savage instincts of their race.
"The wives of the missionaries tried to prevent them, but a famous
operator having arrived from the South, they said: 'We really must have
just a few lines on our lips, else, when we grow old, we shall be so
ugly.'"--_Journal of a Naturalist_, vol. ii. p. 208.--H.
[70] For the latest details, see Mr. Gustave d'Alaux's articles in the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_, 1853.
[71] The subjoined comparison of the exports of Haytien staple products
may not be uninteresting to many of our readers, while it serves to
confirm the author's assertion. I extract it from a statistical table in
Mackenzie's report to the British government, upon the condition of the
then republic (now empire). Mr. Mackenzie resided there as special
_envoyé_ several years, for the purpose of collecting authentic
information for his government, and his statements may therefore be
relied upon. (_Notes on Hayti_, vol. ii. note FF. London, 1830.)
SUGAR. COTTON. COFFEE.
lbs. lbs. lbs.
1789 141,089,831 7,004,274 76,835,219
1826 32,864 620,972 32,189,784
It will be perceived, from these figures, that the decrease is greatest
in that staple which requires the most laborious cultivation. Thus,
sugar requires almost unremitting toil; coffee, comparatively little.
All branches of industry have fearfully decreased; some of them have
ceased entirely; and the small and continually dwindling commerce of
that wretched country consists now mainly of articles of spontaneous
growth. The statistics of imports are in perfect keeping with those of
exports. (_Op. cit._, vol. ii. p. 183.) As might be expected from such a
state of things, the annual expenditure in 1827 was estimated at a
little more than _double_ the amount of the annual revenue! (_Ibid._,
"Finance.")
That matters have not improved under the administration of that Most
Gracious, Most Christian monarch, the Emperor Faustin I., will be seen
by reference to last year's _Annuaire de la Revue del deux Mondes_,
"Haiti," p. 876, _et seq._, where some curious details about his majesty
and his majesty's sable subjects will be found.
[72] Upon this subject, consult Prichard, d'Orbigny, and A. de Humboldt.
[73] I recollect having read, several years ago, in a Jesuit missionary
journal (I forget its name and date, but am confident that the authority
is a reliable one), a rather ludicrous account of an instance of this
kind. One of the fathers, who had a little isolated village under his
charge, had occasion to leave his flock for a time, and his place,
unfortunately, could not be replaced by another. He therefore called the
most promising of his neophytes, and committed to their care the
domestic animals and agricultural implements with which the society had
provided the newly-converted savages, then left them with many
exhortations and instructions. His absence being prolonged beyond the
period anticipated, the Indians thought him dead, and instituted a grand
funeral feast in his honor, at which they slaughtered all the oxen, and
roasted them by fires made of the ploughs, hoe-handles, etc.; and he
arrived just in time to witness the closing scenes of this mourning
ceremony.--H.