SIR,--You have Homered it of late in a small way, one sees. You profess
to sing the purport of our national struggle. "South chooses to hire its
servants for life, rather than by the day, month, or year; North
bludgeons the Southern brain to prevent the same": that, you say, is the
American Iliad in a Nutshell. In a certain sense, more's the pity, it
must be supposed that you speak correctly; but be assured that this is
the American Iliad in no other nutshell than your private one,--in those
too contracted cerebral quarters to which, with respect to our matters,
your powerful intelligence, under such prolonged and pitiless extremes
of dogmatic compression, has at last got reduced.
Seriously, not in any trivial wilfulness of retort, I accuse you of a
narrowness and pettiness of understanding with regard to America. Give
me leave to "wrestle a fall" with you on this theme. And as I can with
but twoscore years match your threescore and five, let me entreat of
your courtesy to set that circumstance aside, and to constitute me, for
the nonce, your equal in age and privilege of speech. For I must wrestle
to-day in earnest!
You are a great nature, a great writer, and a man of piercing intellect:
he is a jack or a dunce that denies it. But of you, more than of most
men at all your equals in intellectual resource, it may be said that
yours is not a spherical or universal, but a special and linear
intelligence,--of great human depth and richness, but special
nevertheless. Of a particular order of truths you are an incomparable
champion; but always you are the champion and on the field, always your
genius has its visor down, and glares through a loop-hole with
straitened intentness of vision. A particular sort of errors and
falsities you can track with the scent of a blood-hound, and with a
speed and bottom not surpassed, if equalled; but the Destinies have put
the nose of your genius to the ground, and sent it off for good and all
upon a particular trail. You sound, indeed, before your encounter, such
a thrilling war-note as turns the cripple's crutch to an imaginary
lance; you open on your quarry with such a cry as kindles a huntsman's
heart beneath the bosoms of nursing mothers. No living writer possesses
the like fascination. Yet, in truth, we should all have tired of your
narrow stringency long ago, did there not run in the veins of your
genius so rich and ruddy a human blood. The profoundness of your
interest in man, and the masterly way in which you grasp character, give
to your thought an inner quality of centrality and wholeness, despite
the dogmatic partiality of its shaping at your hands. And so your
enticement continues, intensely partial though it be.
Continues,--but with growing protest, and growing ground for it. For, to
speak the truth, by your kind permission, without reserve, you are
beginning to suffer from yourself. You are threatening to perish of too
much Thomas Carlyle, I venture to caution you against that tremendous
individual. He is subduing your genius to his own special humors; he is
alloying your mental activity, to a fearful degree, with dogmatic
prepossession; he is making you an intellectual _routinier_, causing
thereby an infiltration of that impurity of which all routine at last
dies. For years we that love you most have seen that you were ceasing
more and more to hold open, fresh relations with truth,--that you were
straitening and hardening into the linear, rigid eagerness of the mere
propagandist. You have, if I may so speak, been turning all your
front-head into back-head, giving to your cerebral powers the characters
of preappointed, automatic action, which are proper to the cerebellum.
It cannot be denied that you have thus acquired a remarkable,
machine-like simplicity, force, and constancy of mental action,--your
brain-wheels spinning away with such a steam-engine whirr as one cannot
but admire; but, on the other hand, as was inevitable, you have become
astonishingly insensitive to all truths, save those with which you are
established in organic connection; nor could the products of Manchester
mills be bargained for beforehand with more certainty than the results
of your intellectual activity. You can be silent,--I venture to assert
so much; but if you speak at all, we know perfectly well what
description of fabric _must_ come from your loom.
It does not, therefore, surprise us, does not clash with our sense of
your native greatness, that for our particular Iliad you prove a very
nutshell Homer indeed. For I must not disguise it from you that this is
exactly the case. It was _Homerus in nuce_ first; and the pitiful
purport of the epic results less from any smallness in the action
celebrated than from that important law, not, perhaps, wholly new to
your own observation, which forbids a pint-measure to contain more than
a pint, though you dip it full from the ocean itself.
You are great, but not towards us Americans. Towards us you are little
and insignificant and superfluous. Your eyes, though of wondrous
efficacy in their way, blink in our atmosphere like those of an owl in
broad sunlight; and if you come flying here, it is the privilege of the
smallest birds--of which you are quite at liberty to esteem me one--to
pester you back into your medieval twilight.
Shall I try to tell you why you can have no right to judge us and our
affairs? By your leave, then, and briefly.
There is a spiritual nature of man, which is ever and everywhere the
same; and, through the necessary presence of this in every human being,
there is a common sense and a common conscience, which make each man one
with all others. Here in America we are seeking to give the force of
political sovereignty to this common and unitive nature,--assuming that
all political problems are at last questions of simple justice, courage,
good sense, and fellow-feeling, which any sound heart and healthy
intelligence may appreciate.
On the other hand, there is the truth of spiritual Rank or Degree,--that
one man may be immensely superior in human quality to another. This is
the truth that is most powerfully present to your mind, and you would
constitute government strictly, if not solely, in the light of it. To
this you are impelled by the peculiar quality of your genius, which is
so purely _biographical_, so inevitably drawn to special personalities,
that you can hardly conceive of history otherwise than as a record of
personal influence.
We assume, then, as a basis, common sense; you, uncommon sense. We
assume Unity or Identity; you assume Difference, and seek to
reconstitute unity only through mastership on the one hand and reverent
obedience on the other. We do not deny Difference; we recognize the
truth of spiritual Degree; we merely _elect the common element as the
material out of which to constitute, and the force by which to operate,
the State._
Now my judgment is, that either the truth of a common Manhood or the
truth of spiritual Rank may be made primary in a State, and that with
admirable results, provided it be duly allied and tempered with its
opposite. For these opposites I hold to be correlative and polaric, each
required by the other. But chasm is worse than indistinction; and he
that breaks the circle of human fellowship is more mischievous than he
who blurs the hues of gradation.
I affirm, then, that America has a grand spiritual fact at the base of
her political system. But you are the prophet of an opposite order of
truths. And you are so intensely the partisan of your pole, that you
have not a moment's patience with anything else, above all with an
opposite partiality. And wanting sympathy and patience with it, you
equally want apprehension of its meaning.
But this is not all. An awful shadow accompanies the brilliant day of
your genius. That dark humor of yours, that woful demon from whose
companionship, by the law of your existence, you cannot be free, tolls
funeral-bells and chants the dirges of death in your ears forever. What
your faith does not take with warmth to its bosom it must spurn
violently away; where you cannot hope strongly, you must vehemently
despair; what your genius does not illumine to your heart it must bury
as in shadows of eternal night. It being, therefore, of the nature of
your mind to shine powerfully on the eminences of mankind, it became in
consequence no less its nature to call up over the broad levels a black
fog that even its own eye could not penetrate. Thus with you, if I
understand you rightly, the _common_ and the _fateful_ are nearly one
and the same; the Good is to you an exceptional energy which struggles
up from the level forces of the universe. Is not your conception of
human existence nearly this: a perpetual waste deluge, and here and
there some Noah in his ark above it?
There is noble truth to be seen from this point of view,--truth to which
America also will have to attend. But being intensely limited to this
sole point of view, you are _utterly_ without eye for the whole
significance of our national life. You are not only _at_ the opposite
pole from us, but your whole heart and intelligence are _included in_
the currents of that polaric opposition.
Still further. I think, that, having made out its scheme of thought,
your mind soon contracts a positive demand _even for the evil
conditions_ which, in your estimation, made that scheme necessary. To
illustrate. A man is roused at night, and sent flying for a physician in
some sudden and terrible emergency. He returns, broken-winded, to learn
that it was altogether a false alarm. It is quite possible that his
first emotion, on receiving this intelligence, will not be pleasure, but
indignation; he may feel that somebody ought to _be_ sick, since he has
been at such pains. Pardon me, if I think your position not wholly
dissimilar. It seems to me to have become an imperative requisition of
your mind that nine-tenths of mankind should be fools. They _must_ be
so; else you have no place for them in your system, and know not what to
do with them. As fools, you have full arrangements made for their
accommodation. Some hero, some born ruler of men, is to come forth (out
of your books) and reduce them to obedience, and lord it over them in a
most useful manner. But if they will not be fools, if they
contumaciously refuse to be fools, they disturb the necessary
conditions of kingship, and, of course, deserve much reprobation. I do
not, therefore, feel myself unjust to you in saying, that, the better
the American people behave, _in consistency with their political
traditions and customary modes of thought_, the less you are able to be
pleased with them. If they demean themselves as fools and incapables,
(as they sometimes do,) they bring grist to your mill; but if they show
wisdom, courage, and constancy, they leave you to stand at your
mill-doors and grumble for want of toll,--as in the nutshell-epic
aforesaid.
Well, there are many foolish and some wise, and I, for one, could
heartily wish both classes more justly placed; for he who styles me an
extreme intrepid democrat pays me a compliment to which I have no claim.
While, then, by "kingship" you meant something human and noble, while I
could deem the command you coveted for strong and wise men to be
somewhat which should _lift the weak and unwise above the range of their
own force and intelligence_, I held your prophesying in high esteem, and
readily pardoned any excesses of expression into which your prophetic
_afflatus_ (being Scotch) might betray you.
But your appetite for kingship seems to have gained in strength while it
lost in delicacy and moral significance, till it has become an
insatiable craving, which disdains not to batten on very vile garbage.
If one rule, and another be ruled, and if the domination be open, frank,
and vigorous, you seem to feast on the fact, be this domination as
selfish in its nature and as brutal in its form as it may. Whether its
aim be to uplift or to degrade its subjects, whether it be clean or
filthy, of heaven or of hell, a stress of generous purpose or a mere
emphasis of egotism,--what pause do you make to inquire concerning this?
The appearance is, that any sovereignty, in these democratic days, is
over-welcome to your hunger to admit of pause; and a rule, whose
undisguised aim is, not to supplement the strength of the weak, but to
pillage them of its product, not to lend the ignorant a wisdom above
their own, but to make their ignorance perpetual as a source of
pecuniary profit to their masters, may reckon upon your succors whenever
succors are needed.
Hence your patronage of our slavery. Hence your effort to commend it by
a description so incomparably false, that, though one should laugh
derision at it from Christmas to Candlemas, he would not laugh enough.
"Hiring servants for life,"--that is the most intrepid _lucus a non
lucendo_ of the century. It fairly takes one's breath away. It is
stunning, ravishing. One can but cry, on recovering his wind,--Hear, O
Caucus, and give ear, O Mock-Auction! ye railway Hudsons, tricksters,
impostors, ye demagogues that love the people in stump-speeches at $----
per year, ye hired bravos of the bar that stab justice in the dark, ye
Jesuit priests that "lie for God," listen all, and learn how to do it!
What are your timid devices, compared with this of benumbing your
adversary at the start by an outright electric shock of untruth? But a
man must be supported by a powerful sense of sincerity to be capable of
a statement so royally false that the truth itself shall look tame and
rustic beside it.
You have spoken ill of a certain sort of German metaphysic; but I
perceive that you have now become a convert to it. The final _arcanum_
of that, I think, is, Something = Nothing. You give this abstraction a
concrete form; your axiom is, No Hire = Hire for Life. To deny that
laborers have any property in their own toil, and to allow them their
poor peck of maize and pound of bacon per week, not at all as a wage for
their work, but solely as a means of converting corn into cotton, and
cotton into seats in Congress and summers at Saratoga,--that, according
to the Chelsea metaphysic, is "hiring them for life"! To deny laborers
any legal _status_ as persons, and any social _status_ as human
souls,--to give them fodder for food, and pens for homes,--to withhold
from them the school, the table, and the sanctities of marriage,--if
that is not "hiring them for life," what is it? To affirm, by
consistent practice, that no spiritual, no human value appertains to the
life of laboring men and women,--to rate them in their very persons as
commercial values, measuring the virtue of their existence with coin, as
cloths are measured with a yardstick,--this, we all see, is "hiring them
for life"! To take from women the LEGAL RIGHT to be chaste,--to make it
a _capital offence_ for a woman of the laboring caste to defend her own
person by blows, for any "husband" or father of the laboring caste to
defend wife or daughter with blows, against the lust of another caste,
and, having made them thus helpless before outrage, to close the
judicial tribunals against their testimony, and refuse them the faintest
show of redress,--truly, it is very kind of you to let us know that this
is the simplest piece of "hiring for life," for without that charitable
assistance the fact would surely have eluded our discovery. How could we
have found it out without your assistance, when, after that aid has been
rendered, the fact continues to seem so utterly otherwise as to reflect
even upon your generous information the colors of an unexampled untruth?
No-Hire + Dehumanization of the Laborer = Life-Hire? We never should
have dreamt of it!
Within the past year, a document has come into my hands which they may
thank their stars who are not required to see. It is the private diary
of a most eminent and respectable slaveholder, recently dead. The
chances of war threw it into the hands of our troops, and the virtue of
a noble surgeon rescued it from defiling uses, and sent it to me, as one
whose duty bound him to know the worst. Of its authenticity there is not
a shadow of question. And such a record of pollution,--of wallowing, to
which the foulness of swine is as the life of honey-bees harboring in
the bosoms of roses,--I deliberately suppose can never have got into
black and white before. Save in general terms, I can hardly speak of it;
but one item I must have the courage to suggest more definitely. Having
bidden a young slave-girl (whose name, age, color, etc., with the
shameless precision that marks the entire document, are given) to attend
upon his brutal pleasure, and she silently remaining away, he
writes,--"Next morning ordered her a dozen lashes for disobedience."[7]
For disobedience, observe! She had been "hired for life"; the great
Carlyle had witnessed the bargain; and behold, she has broken the
contract! She must be punished; Mr. Carlyle and his co-cultivator of the
virtue of obedience (_par nobile fratrum_) will see to it that she is
duly punished. She shall go to the whipping-post, this disobedient
virgin; she shall have twelve lashes, (for the Chelsea gods are severe,
and know the use of "beneficent whip,")--twelve lashes on the naked
person,--blows with the terrible slave-whip, beneath which the skin
purples in long, winding lines, then breaks and gushes into spirts of
red blood, and afterwards cicatrizes into perpetual scars; for
disobedience is an immorality not to be overlooked!
Yes, Thomas Carlyle, I hold you a party to these crimes. _You_, YOU are
the brutal old man who would flog virgins into prostitution. You approve
the system; you volunteer your best varnish in its commendation; and
this is an inseparable and _legal_ part of it. Legal, I say,--legal, and
not destructive of respectability. That is the point. In ordering such
lashes, that ancient miscreant (for old he already was) neither violated
any syllable of the slave-code, nor forfeited his social position. He
was punishing "disobedience"; he was admministering "justice"; he was
illustrating the "rights of property"; he was using the lawful
"privileges of gentlemen."
No doubt, deeds of equal infamy are done in the dens of New York. But
in New York they _are_ infamous. In New York they are indeed done in
_dens_, by felons who flee the eye of the policeman,--unless, to be
sure, the police have been appointed by a certain _alter ego_ of yours
in negro-hatred, whilom chief magistrate and disgrace of that
unfortunate city. But under your life-service _régime_ things are
managed in a more enlightened way. There they who have liberty--and
_sometimes_ use the liberty--to torture women into beastly submissions,
do not hide from the laws, they make the laws. There such a personage as
the one mentioned may be a _gentleman_, a man of high standing," one of
the most respectable men in the State" (Florida).
And this, just _this_,--for surely you will not be a coward, and dodge
consequences,--you name a scheme of life-hire. This you esteem so much
superior to our democratic way of holding each man and woman to be the
shrine of rights which have an infinite sanctity, and of adjudging it
the chief duty of the State to annex to these rights the requisite force
for their practical assertion.
Is it, then, You, or is it some burglarious Devil that has broken into
your bosom and stolen your soul, who is engaged in plastering over this
infernal fester with smooth euphemisms? Are You verily the mechanic who
is engaged in veneering these out-houses of hell with rosewood? Is it
your very and proper Self that stands there sprinkling _eau-de-Cologne_
on the accursed reek of that pit of putrescence, so to disguise and
commend it to the nostrils of mankind? Is it in very deed Thomas
Carlyle, Thomas the Great, who now volunteers his services as male
lady's-maid to the queen-strumpet of modern history, and offers to her
sceptred foulness the benefit of his skill at the literary rouge-pots?
You? Yes? I give you joy of your avocations! Truly, it was worth the
while, having such a cause, to defame a noble people in the very hour of
their life-and-death struggle!
Well, you have made your election; now I make mine. It is my deliberate
belief that no man ever gave heartier love and homage to another than I
to you; but while one woman in America may be _lawfully_ sent to the
whipping-post on such occasion, I will hold your existence and name, if
they come between me and her rescue, but as the life of a stinging gnat!
I love you,--but cannot quite sacrifice to you the sanctity of
womanhood, and all the honor and all the high hopes of a great nation.
Your scheme of "life-hire" will therefore have to undergo very essential
modifications, such as will not only alter, but _reverse_, its most
characteristic features, before I can esteem either it or the advocacy
of it anything less than abominable.
But where are you now with relation to that Thomas Carlyle whose "Sartor
Resartus" I read twenty years ago afoot and on horseback, sleeping with
it under my pillow and wearing it in my pocket till pocket and it were
worn out,--I alone there in the remote solitudes of Maine? We have both
travelled far since then; but whither have you been travelling? The
whole wide heaven was not too wide for you then; but now you can be
jolly in your "nutshell." Then, you held spiritual, or human, values to
be final, infinite, absolute, and could gibe in your own incomparable
way at the besotted conventionalism which would place commercial values
above them; now, who chants with such a roaring, pious nasal at that
apotheosis of Property which our modern commercial slavery essentially
is? Then, with Schiller, you desired, as a basis of political society,
something better than a doctrine of personal _rights_, something more
noble, human, unitary, something more opposed to egoistic
self-assertion, namely, a doctrine of _powers_ and their consequent
_duties_; now, a scheme of society which is the merest riot or
insurrection of property-egotism reckons you among its chiefest
advocates. Then, you struck heroically out for a society more adequate
to the spiritual possibilities of man; now, social infidelity _plus_
cotton and polite dining would seem to suffice for you.
Ah, Heaven! is anything sadder than to see a grand imperial soul, long
worthy and secure of all love and honor, at length committing suicide,
not by dying, but by living? Ill it is when they that do deepest homage
to a great spirit can no longer pray for the increase of his days; when
there arises in their hearts a pleasure in the growing number of his
years expressly as these constitute a deduction from the unknown sum
total of those which have been appointed him; and when the utmost
bravery of their affection must breathe, not _Serus_, but CITO _in cadum
redeas!_ O royal Lear of our literature, who have spurned from your love
the dearest daughter of your thought, is it only left us to say, "How
friendly is Death,--Death, who restores us to free relations with the
whole, when our own fierce partialities have imprisoned and bound us
hand and foot"?
Royal you are, royal in pity as in purpose; and you have done, nay, I
trust may still be doing, imperishable work. If only you did not hate
democracy so bitterly as to be perpetually prostrated by the recoil of
your own gun! Right or wrong in its inception, this aversion has now
become a chronic ailment, which drains insatiably at the fountains of
your spiritual force. I offer you the suggestion; I can do no more.
To have lost, in the hour of our trial, the fellowship of yourself, and
of others in England whom we most delighted to honor, is a loss indeed.
Yet we grieve a thousand times more for you than for ourselves; and are
not absorbed in any grief. It is clear to us that the Eternal Providence
has assigned us our tasks, not by your advice, nor by vote of
Parliament,--astonishing to sundry as that may seem. Your opinion of the
matter we hold, therefore, to be quite beside the matter; and drivel,
like that of your nutshell-epic, by no means tends to make us wish that
Providence had acted upon European counsel rather than upon His Own!
Moreover, we are _very_ busy in these days, and can have small eye to
the by-standers. We are busy, and are likely to be so long; for the
peace that succeeds to such a war will be as dangerous and arduous as
the war itself. We have as little time, therefore, to grieve as to brag
or bluster; we must work. We neither solicit nor repel your sympathy; we
must work,--work straight on, and let all that be as it can be.
We seek not to conceal even from _you_ that our democracy has great
weaknesses, as well as great strength. Mean, mercenary, and stolid men
are not found in England alone; they are ominously abundant here also.
We have lunatic radicalisms as well as sane, idiotic conservatisms as
well as intelligent. Too much for safety, our politics are purulent, our
good men over-apt to forget the objects of government in a besotted
devotion to the form. It is possible we may yet discover that universal
suffrage can be a trifle too universal,--that it should pause a _little_
short of the state-prison. New York must see to it that the thief does
not patronize the judge, and sit in the prisoner's box as on the bench
of a higher court. Our democracy has somewhat to learn; it _knows_ that
it has somewhat to learn, and says cheerfully, "What is the use of
living without learning?"
What can we do but meet the future with an open intelligence and a stout
heart? And this I say,--I, who am almost an extreme dissenter from
extreme democracy,--if our people bring to all future emergencies those
qualities of earnestness, courage, and constancy which they have thus
far contributed to the present, they will disgrace neither themselves
nor their institutions; and it will be their honor more than once to
extort some betrayal of dissatisfaction from those who, like yourself,
are happiest to see a democracy behaving, not well, but ill.
"Peter of the North," then, has made up his mind. He is resolved on
having three things:--
First, a government; a real government; a government not to be whistled
down the wind by any jack (or Jeff) who chooses to secede: a government
that will not dawdle with hands in pockets while this continent is
converted into a maggot-swarm of ten-acre empires;
Secondly, a government whose purpose, so far as it can act, shall be to
forward _every_ man on the path of his proper humanity;
Thirdly, a government constituted and operated, so far as shall finally
prove possible, by the common intelligence and common conscience of the
whole people.
This is Peter's business at present: he is intently minding his
business; and has been heard to mutter in his breast that "it might be
as well if others did the same." What "others," pray?
* * * * *