| <The Saturday Review March 14, 1857>
| <Slavery, and its Remedies>
| <Lord Robert Cecil>
| <pb n="247">
| We have been deluged with anti-slavery literature of late 
| years.  The wrongs of the negro are precisely of that class, 
| on which the English people love to expend their sympathy.  
| His sufferings are real and practical, and require neither 
| effort of thought nor glow of fancy to apprehend them.  The 
| coldest imagination can realize the unpleasantness of being 
| flogged to death.  At the same time, our denunciations do 
| not involve the necessity either of self-censure or 
| self-amendment.  It is not often that we can have the luxury 
| of being humane without paying for it; but, in the present case, 
| we are fairly entitled to the indulgence, in consideration of 
| the boldness with which we faced the cost and risk of 
| emancipation in our own colonies.  Accordingly, the 
| Abolitionist champions, whether they appear in the guise of 
| novelists or travelers, have always received a hearty 
| welcome among us.  Few of us can forget the 
| <hi rend="italic"> furor </hi> which Mrs. Stowe's book 
| excited in England.  Every class anathematized slavery 
| with a unanimity of execration which we generally reserve 
| exclusively for Cardinal Wiseman.  As for Mrs. Stowe 
| herself, she attained the pinnacle of true Republican 
| ambition ~~ she was lionized and petted by a duchess.  
| Attracted by the magnet of such patronage as this, it is not 
| wonderful that many a stray missile from the American 
| fray has fallen on our shores.  In truth, between Mrs. Stowe 
| and the late Presidential election, the subject has become 
| somewhat stale; but the shelves of publishers still groan 
| with the philanthropy of pamphleteers.  Any new claimant 
| on our attention must show cause why he should not be 
| consigned to the limbo of all threadbare themes ~~ why he 
| should not moulder beside Newdegate on the Jew-Bill, and 
| Berkeley on the Ballot.  Assuredly, it is not his style which 
| will save Dr. Hall from such a fate.  He is one of those 
| authors who rely for vigour entirely on their printer.  If the 
| correction of the press had been entrusted to a committee of 
| school-girls, the array of italics, capitals, and notes of 
| admiration could not have been more formidable.  At the 
| same time, the pathos and the eloquence are worthy of the 
| <hi rend="italic"> Morning Herald </hi> itself.  In fact, Dr. 
| Hall seems to combine in his single pen the graces which 
| adorn feminine composition at all periods of life.
| But, badly as they are dressed, the ideas contained in his 
| book rise considerably above the mass of the literature to 
| which it belongs.  He abstains from a mere parade of 
| well-culled anecdotes, which, after all, never indicate the 
| average of the tendencies which they are quoted to 
| illustrate, but only the extremest range to which those 
| tendencies have run.  He points out the obstacles which lie 
| in the way of the Abolitionist, and at the same time shows 
| great judgment in discriminating the evils which are the 
| true reproach of American slavery, and for which no 
| expediency, no material exigencies, can afford the faintest 
| palliation.  These do not consist in the barbarities which 
| may be occasionally practiced, and which are generally 
| quoted as the condemnation of the system.  Mr. Dickens, 
| Mrs. Stowe, and other writers have surfeited us with 
| horrors, and have drawn from them their main argument 
| against slavery.  Yet it is evident, from the nature of the 
| case, that these must be exceptional.  If one moiety of the 
| population were in the habit of putting the other moiety ~~ 
| a race physically stronger than themselves ~~ to refined 
| and causeless torture, their crimes would, long ere this, 
| have been avenged and arrested by a servile war.  But it is 
| the constant testimony of all travellers who do not cross the 
| Atlantic with the fixed intention 
| of paying their passage-money by
| the proceeds of a biting satire, that the prototypes 
| of Legree are rare.  Dr. Hall himself quotes, as a proof of 
| the degradation of the negroes, that many of them prefer 
| slavery to freedom.  Indeed, the very charge that negroes 
| are treated like cattle implies that they are generally cared 
| for like cattle.  Isolated acts of cruelty are no more an 
| argument against slavery than against omnibus-driving.  
| The real opprobrium of the system lies in this ~~ that its 
| existence absolutely requires the utter degradation, moral 
| and intellectual, of the unhappy race over whom it reigns.  
| Men with living souls have to bear the part, and submit to 
| the degradation, of brutes; and therefore all that art can do 
| must be done to liken them to brutes.  Education is 
| proscribed by savage laws.  It is not merely that the 
| schoolmaster and the missionary are forbidden to ply their 
| craft among the slaves of an unwilling owner ~~ the owner 
| himself, even if he be so minded, dare not allow his wife or 
| daughters to teach the alphabet to a black boy on the estate.  
| <p> "The ample page, rich with the stores of time," </p> 
| the accumulated heritage of the human race, is sealed to 
| them, not by want of means or opportunity, but by the 
| selfishness of those who have the might, acting under the 
| sacred sanctions of law.  The world has been plagued by 
| many a capricious tyrant, and law has been perverted to 
| cloak many a strange freak of oppression; but from Deioces 
| to Yeh, from King Tarquin to King Ferdinand, it has never 
| entered the head of the wildest of them to put knowledge 
| itself under a ban.  It was reserved for a model republic to 
| put the coping-stone on the edifice of despotism.  The 
| reason of this proud pre-eminence is plain.  The feudal lord 
| might let his serfs pick up, if they liked, the rudiments of 
| learning from the neighbouring monastery, and the Roman 
| master might be surrounded with slaves whose high 
| education formed their market value, because serfdom and 
| slavery were accepted by the opinion of the age, and there 
| could be no danger of slaves learning to assert rights which 
| would be looked upon by everybody else as imaginary.  
| But the Americans have to contend, not only with the 
| denunciations of Christendom, but with their own loudly 
| proclaimed doctrines.  Crime, therefore, has to be propped 
| by crime.  The slave-owning vindicators of freedom must, 
| in mere self-preservation, shut out the light from their 
| victims ~~ else it would be impossible to maintain slavery 
| in a land whose first principle is that all men are inalienably 
| free.
| But the depth of their degradation is not sufficiently 
| represented by the fact that education is absolutely closed 
| to them.  They are cattle; and if more cattle are wanted, 
| they must increase like cattle.  Accordingly, the American 
| law lays down that marriage is incompatible with the 
| condition of a slave; and the theory is thoroughly carried 
| out.  Slave-breeding has become a trade.  Whole States ~~ 
| Virginia and Kentucky, for example ~~ have devoted 
| themselves to that department of industry; 
| and the slave-breeder shows, in the
| exercise of his craft, about as much 
| regard to the sanctity of marriage as is shown by the 
| shepherd or the dog-fancier.  In most Eastern countries the 
| slave-market feeds the harem, especially where 
| Mohammedanism prevails; but this system has no analogy 
| to the degradations of
| <pb n="248">
| slave-breeding in America.  There, in a Christian country 
| ~~ smiled on by ministers of the Gospel as <p> "a peculiar 
| domestic institution" </p> ~~ is an hereditary caste of 
| prostitutes and adulterers.  The tone of morality of every 
| negro man and woman is, in the Southern States, 
| irrevocably fixed from their cradles; and that tone is a 
| direct negative of the precepts of Christianity.  This, far 
| more than individual acts of barbarity, or violations of a 
| theoretic right of freedom, is the <p> "damned spot" </p> 
| on American institutions which bluster cannot shroud nor 
| expediency wash out.
| Dr. Hall exposes with much force the inadequacy of the 
| two remedies which are popular among the champions of 
| liberty in the North.  Sudden abolition would starve slave 
| and master alike.  The natives of tropical climates are 
| naturally indolent; and the fact that no motive to work has 
| ever been held out to him except the lash, makes him look 
| upon idleness as a convertible term for Paradise.  The 
| example of the English colonies sufficiently proves that the 
| sudden cessation of slavery would be the sudden cessation 
| of labour.  Nor could the place of the negroes be supplied 
| by large importation of European labourers, even if capital 
| for so gigantic an enterprise could be found.  The 
| cultivation of some of the crops ~~ rice, for example ~~ is 
| fatal to the health of the white man.  M. de Tocqueville's 
| summary remedy ~~ <f> </f> ~~ is not calculated to 
| recommend any scheme of abolition in the eyes of a 
| Southern landowner.  But Dr. Hall calls the <q> </q> of the 
| United States ~~ in other words, in the invincible objection 
| which the white man has to give protection, or even 
| toleration, to the black.  The popular idea of a Free State is 
| a place where a man may go where he likes, and do what he 
| likes, so long as he does not injure his neighbour.  But this 
| is not the conception which many of the Free States of 
| America have formed of their functions.  Setting aside the 
| Fugitive Slave Law, in respect to which the North is 
| probably more chargeable with cowardice than with 
| complicity, the internal legislation of many of the States 
| calling themselves free is utterly disgraceful to 
| communities that have the language of the Declaration of 
| Independence on their lips.  In Indiana and Illinois, a free 
| African is forbidden by the law to reside in the State or to 
| follow any useful occupation.  If he ventures to put such an 
| interpretation on his freedom, he is liable to be resold into 
| slavery.  The legislation in Ohio is equally severe.  In 
| Connecticut, the whites for many years retained upon their 
| statute-book an act prohibiting the education of free black 
| children; and with such ferocity was it enforced, that they 
| actually imprisoned a lady for teaching the alphabet to 
| some African girls, who, according to the theory of the law, 
| were as free as herself.  This legislative excommunication 
| descends into still more extraordinary minutae.  In New 
| York, a black man may be a minister of religion ~~ nay, he 
| may be a Doctor in Divinity ~~ but he is not allowed to 
| enter an omnibus.  In Philadelphia, the prohibition is 
| stronger still ~~ a black man may not <hi rend="italic"> 
| drive </hi> an omnibus.  We shall learn henceforth to view 
| with more reverence the noble craft and mystery of 
| omnibus-driving.  So far as we know, the Americans are 
| the only great people who think it necessary, by legislative 
| interference, to guarantee the purity of their blood.  
| Aristocratic as the English are accused of being, these 
| extravagances seem incredible to us, who see the Minister 
| of Hayti at a <hi rend="italic"> levee </hi> without feeling 
| half the incongruity which is produced by his American 
| colleague's ostentatious eccentricity of dress.  But it is plain 
| that, with these monstrous feelings of repulsion, if it is 
| difficult to convert slaves into willing labourers, 
| slaveowners will be ten times more reluctant to subside into 
| the character of employers.  The intensity of feeling is too 
| strong to endure, without an entire convulsion of society, so 
| sudden a change as total abolition.
| The scheme of colonization in Liberia Dr. Hall dismisses 
| with deserved contempt.  How far it is likely to accomplish 
| the end which it professes to have in view, may be judged 
| from the fact that, in 1852, the increase of slaves was 
| fifteen times as great as the number of emigrants whom the 
| Colonization Society were able to send out.  Dr. Hall hints 
| that they feel a keener interest in getting rid of the incubus 
| of the free blacks than in any other advantage likely to 
| result from the scheme.  This is very possible.  Mrs. 
| Partington is generally to be found in the ranks of that class 
| of philanthropists who have an eye to the main chance.  It 
| amuses an uneasy conscience to mop up the flood which its 
| own guilt has let loose.
| His own remedy Dr. Hall shall state in his own somewhat 
| boastful words:  ~~
| <q> </q>
| Unhappily, this, like every other remedy, presupposes a 
| wisdom and a self-sacrifice not often found in those who 
| have habitually lived on the brutalization of their 
| fellow-men.  Meanwhile, the prospect is a fearful one.  The 
| Africans breed faster than the white man; and the cry is 
| everywhere, not for a slower but for a more rapid increase 
| of slaves.  Already, in some States, they equal the white 
| population; and, already, savage repressive laws indicate 
| that they are beginning to feel their power and their wrongs.  
| But their masters will not see it.  The sin that hardens also 
| blinds.  Perverted morality avenges itself.  An overweening 
| confidence in prescriptive superiority is the direct and 
| unfailing consequence of the haughty selfishness which 
| consents to exalt itself on the misery of others.