INDEPENDENCE.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
If the scale of precedence in the mental development of our
fellow-creatures can be determined by any single test, that test is the
instinctive love of Independence. Many of the lower animals may
surprise us by constructive achievements that rival the products of
human science, but their instinct of freedom is quite imperfectly
developed. The caterpillar of the silk-moth will spin its satin
winter-gown in a box full of mulberry leaves as skilfully as in the
freedom of the tropical forests. In the hive of their captor a swarm of
wild bees will continue to build hexagons and store up honey as
diligently as in the rocks or hollow trees of the wilderness. Captive
river-fish will eat and pair a day after their transfer to a fishpond.
Birds, on the other hand, mourn their lost liberty for weeks. During
the first half-month of its captivity, a caged hawk rarely accepts any
food; sea-birds and eagles starve with a persistence as if they were
thus trying to end an affliction from which they see no other way of
escape. Wild cows can be domesticated in a month; wild elephants hardly
in a year. Several species of the larger carnivora can be trained only
if caught in their cub-hood, as in after years they become almost
wholly untamable. The lower varieties of quadrumana, the Brazilian
capuchin monkeys and East Indian macaques, seem almost to invite
capture by the frequency of their visits to the neighborhood of human
dwellings, while the apes proper are, without any exception, the shyest
creatures of the virgin woods. The gorilla is so rarely seen in the
vicinity of human settlements that its very existence was long
considered doubtful. Sir Stamford Raffles asserts that at the distant
sound of an ax the orang of Sumatra at once abandons its favorite
haunts in the coast jungles. On the west coast of Borneo a large orang
was once surprised by the crew of an English trading-vessel, but fought
with a desperation that obliged its would-be captors to riddle it with
rifle-balls, though they knew that a living specimen of that size would
be worth its weight in silver.
That same resolution in defense of their liberties has always
distinguished the nobler from the baser tribes of the human race. The
natives of the Gambia Valley have no hesitation in selling their
relatives to the Portuguese slave-traders, while the liberation of a
single countryman (whom the enemy had determined to hold as a hostage)
impelled the Circassian highlanders to risk their lives in a series of
desperate assaults upon the ramparts of a Russian frontier post. The
hope of covering the retreat of their fleeing wives and children
inspired the heroes of Thermopylæ to make a stand against
six-thousandfold odds. The crimps of the Christian church-despots found
no difficulty in foisting their yoke upon the former vassals of the
Roman empire, but when they attempted to cross the border of the Saxon
Landmark, the kidnappers were slain like rabid wolves; and when the
neighboring ruffian-counts, and at last Charlemagne in person, marched
to the support of the clerical slave-hunters, they met with a
resistance the record of which will forever remain the proudest page in
the chronicle of the Germanic races. Cornfields were burnt, villages
were leveled with the ground; for hundreds of miles the means of human
subsistence were utterly destroyed; but the council of the Saxon
chieftains refused to submit, and when the homes of their forefathers
were devastated, they carried their children to the inaccessible wilds
of the Harz highlands, where they grimly welcomed the aid of the winter
snows, and defied frost and starvation, rather than crawl to cross (zu
Kreuze kriechen), as their vernacular stigmatized the cowardice of
their crucifix-kissing neighbors. And when the Frankish autocrat had
shackled their land with a chain of forts, they thrice rebelled with
persistent disregard of consequences; nay, after the loss of the last
murderous battle, the prisoners of war refused to accept the ultimatum
of the conqueror, and rather than crawl to cross four thousand of their
captive noblemen mounted the scaffold of the executioner on the
market-square of Quedlinburg. The bodies of the heroes were thrown to
the birds of the wilderness; but their deathless spirits revived in the
philippics of Martin Luther and the battle-shout of Lützen and
Oudenaarde, and will yet ride the storm destined to hurl the last cross
from the temples of the Germanic nations.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Since the dawn of history the lands of freedom have produced fruits and
flowers that refused to thrive on any other soil. For several centuries
civilization was confined to a small country of republics: Attic and
Theban Greece. “Study the wonders of that age,” says Byron to his
friend Trelawney, “and compare them with the best ever done under
masters.” Switzerland, in spite of its rocky soil, has for centuries
been the happiest, as well as the freest, country of Europe. The
prosperity of the United States of America, since the establishment of
their independence, stands unparalleled in the history of the last
eighteen hundred years; and, moreover, the degree of that prosperity
has been locally proportioned to the degree of social freedom, and has
begun to become general only since the general abolition of slavery.
Freedom blesses the poorest soil, as despotism blights the most
fertile, and it is only an apparent exception from that rule that Italy
continued to flourish during the first two centuries of the empire. The
change in the form of government was at first nominal, rather than
real, and under the rule of Augustus, Trajan, Hadrian, and the
Antonines, Rome enjoyed more real liberty than many a so-called
republic of modern times. When despotism became a systematic and
chronic actuality, the sun of fortune was soon eclipsed, and the social
climate became as unfavorable to art and literature as to valor and
patriotism.
Personal independence is a not less essential condition of individual
happiness. Bondage in any form, and of silken or gilded, as well as of
iron, fetters, is incompatible with the development of the highest
mental and moral faculties. The genius of Poland and modern Italy has
produced its best fruit in exile. The progress of modern civilization
dates only from the time when knowledge once more flourished in a
Republic of Letters; and for a thousand years the monastery system of
medieval literature produced hardly a single work of genius. Within the
period of the last three or four generations the sun of freedom has
ripened better and more abundant fruit in any single decade than the
dungeon-air of despotism during a series of centuries. All foreign
travelers agree in admiring (or condemning) the early mental
development of American children, who have a chance to exercise their
intellectual faculties in an area untrammeled by the barriers of caste
divisions and social restraints. They may yield to the pupils of the
best European colleges in special branches of scholarship, but in
common sense, general intelligence, general information, in
self-respect, in practical versatility and self-dependence, an American
boy of twelve is, as a rule, more than a match for a
continental-European boy of sixteen; and the same holds good of the
average intelligence and self-dependence of our country population.
With the rarest exceptions the political economists of our Southern
states agree that the agricultural negro as a freeman is a more
valuable laborer than as a slave, and that emancipation, in the long
run, has benefited the planter as well as his serf. I venture even to
add the verdict of Professor Hagenbeck, the founder of the great
zoölogical supply depot, that menagerie-trainers of the least despotic
methods are the most successful. Turf-men know that the best horses do
not come from the unequaled perennial pastures of the lower Danube, but
from England and Araby, where pet colts enjoy almost the freedom of a
pet child.
C.—PERVERSION.
The ethics of Anti-naturalism include the Buddhistic doctrine of
self-abasement, as an indispensable condition of salvation. That
salvation meant extinction, the utter renunciation of earthly hopes and
desires, the mortification of all natural instincts, including the
instinct of freedom. Abject submission to injustice, the subordination
of reason to dogma, the sinfulness of rebellion against the “powers
that be,” were inculcated with a zeal that made the church an
invaluable ally of despotism. For centuries a scepter combining the
form of a cross and a bludgeon was the significant emblem of tyranny.
With the aid, nay, in the name, of the Christian hierarchy, the despots
of the Middle Ages elaborated a system of subordination of personal
freedom to autocratic caprices, which, by comparison, makes the tyranny
of the Cæsars a model of liberalism. Every important function of social
and domestic life was subjected to the control of arbitrary
functionaries, armed with irresponsible power or with a system of
oppressive penal by-laws. Censors suppressed every symptom of visible
or audible protest. Every school was a prison, every judgment-seat a
star-chamber. Peasants and mechanics had no voice in the councils of
their rulers. The merit of official employees was measured by the
degree of their flunkeyism. But the ne-plus-ultras of physical and
moral despotism were combined in the slavery of the monastic convents.
The attempt of reviving the outrages which abbots for centuries
practiced on the unfortunates whom a rash vow (or often the mandate of
a bigoted parent) had submitted to their power, would certainly expose
the manager of a modern convent to the risk of being mobbed and torn
limb from limb. Novices were subjected to all sorts of wanton tortures
and arbitrary deprivation of his scant privileges; they were compelled
to perform shameful and ridiculous acts of self-abasement, all merely
to “break their worldly spirit,” i.e., crush out the last vestige of
self-respect and life-love, in order to prepare them for the
consolations of other-worldliness. The moral emasculation of the human
race seems, indeed, to have been the main purpose of the educational
policy which the priests of the Nature-hating Galilean pursued wherever
the union of Church and State put children and devotees at the mercy of
their dogmatists.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Voluntary slavery means voluntary renunciation of the chief privilege
of human reason: the privilege of self-control. The spendthrift divests
himself of external advantages; the miser yields up his life-blood for
gold; but he who surrenders his personal liberty has sold his soul, as
well as his body. Bondage circumscribes every sphere of activity.
Political despotism impedes the progress of industry as galling fetters
impede the circulation of the blood. Enterprising autocrats of the
Frederic and Peter type have as utterly failed in the attempt of
enforcing a flourishing state of commerce, as they would have failed in
the attempt of enforcing the growth of a stunted tree by the tension of
iron chains. In free America a voluntary pledge of abstinence has
accomplished what in medieval Europe the most Draconic temperance and
anti-tobacco laws failed to achieve.
The educational despotism of moral pedants has ever defeated its own
purpose, and succeeded only in turning frank, merry-souled children
into hypocrites and sneaks. The idea that a barbarous system of
military discipline could develop model warriors has been refuted on
hundreds of battle-fields, where the machine-soldiers of despotic kings
were routed by the onset of enthusiastic patriots, half-trained,
perhaps, and ill-armed, but assembled by an enlistment of souls as well
as of bodies. The unparalleled intellectual barrenness of the Middle
Ages was well explained by the indictment of a modern English poet.
“The bondage of the Christian doctrine,” says Percy Shelley, “is fatal
to the development of originality and genius.” The curse of mediocrity
has, indeed, for ages rested upon every literary product devoted to the
promotion of clerical interests. The Muses refuse to assemble on
Golgotha. Pegasus declines to be yoked with the ass of the Galilean
ascetic. Outspoken skepticism is almost as rare as true genius, and it
is not possible to mistake the significance of the fact that the great
poets and philosophers of the last seven generations were, almost
without an exception, persistent and outspoken skeptics. Rousseau,
Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, Holbach, Leibnitz, Lessing, Kant,
Fichte, Hegel, Schiller, Heine, Schopenhauer, Humboldt, Pope, Hume,
Byron, Shelley, Keats, Gibbon, Buckle, and Darwin have all inscribed
their names in the temple o! Liberalism; and Wolfgang Goethe, the
primate of European literature, was at once the most consistent and the
most anti-Christian of modern thinkers. “His personal appearance,” says
Heinrich Heine, “was as harmonious as his mind. A proudly erect body,
never yet bent by Christian worm-humility; classic features, never
distorted by Christian contrition; eyes that had never been dimmed by
Christian sinner-tears or the apathy of monkish resignation.”
That resignation was for centuries enforced as the first of moral
duties; but Nature has had her revenge, and even the fallen hierarchy
would hesitate to recover the loss of their prestige by a return to the
moral desert which for ages marked the empire of a mind-enslaving
dogma.
E.—REFORM.
Not all slaves can be freed by breaking their shackles; the habit of
servitude may become a hereditary vice, too inveterate for immediate
remedies. The pupils of Freedom’s school may be required to unlearn, as
well as to learn, many lessons; the temples of the future will have to
remove several aphoristic tablets to make room for such mottoes as
“Self-Reliance,” “Liberty,” “Independence.” Victor Jacquemont tells a
memorable story of a Hindoo village, almost depopulated by a famine
caused by the depredations of sacred monkeys, that made constant raids
on the fields and gardens of the superstitious peasants, who would see
their children starve to death rather than lift a hand against the
long-tailed saints. At last the British stadtholder saw a way to
relieve their distress. He called a meeting of their sirdars and
offered them free transportation to a monkeyless island of the Malay
archipelago. Learning that the land of the proposed colony was fertile
and thinly settled, the survivors accepted the proposal with tears of
gratitude; but when the band of gaunt refugees embarked at the mouth of
the Hooghly, the stadtholder’s agent was grieved to learn that their
cargo of household goods included a large cageful of sacred monkeys.
“They are beyond human help,” says the official memorandum, “and their
children can be redeemed only by curing them of the superstition that
has ruined their monkey-ridden ancestors.”
At the end of the fifteenth century, when southern Europe was in danger
of a similar fate from the rapacity of esurient priests and monks,
Providence, by means of an agent called Christoval Columbus, offered
the victims the chance of a free land of refuge; but when the host of
emigrants embarked at the harbor of Palos, philosophers must have been
grieved to perceive that their cargo of household-pets comprised a
large assortment of ecclesiastics. “They are beyond human help,”
Experience might sigh in the words of the British commissioner, “and
their children can be redeemed only by curing them of the superstition
that has proved the ruin of their priest-ridden ancestors.”
In regions of our continent where colonists might live as independent
as the birds of their primeval forests, bondage has been imported in
the form of an intriguing hierarchy, working its restless bellows to
forge the chains of their pupils—of the rising generation, who as yet
seem to hesitate at the way-fork of Feudalism and Reform. A timely word
may decide their choice, and, by all the remaining hopes of Earth and
Mankind! that word shall not remain unspoken.