Cannibals all! or, Slaves without mastersFitzhugh, George
General
Cannibals all! or, Slaves without masters
Fitzhugh, George
Slave labor; Slavery -- Justification; Slavery -- United States; Working class
Aristotle understood this subject thoroughly; and it seems to have been
generally so well comprehended in his day, that he takes little trouble
to explain and expound it. He commences his treatise on Politics and
Economics with the family, and discourses first of the slaves as a part
of the family. He assumes that social life is as natural to man as to
bees and herds; and that the family, including husband, wife, children,
and slaves, is the first and most natural development of that social
nature. As States are composed of families, and as a sound and healthy
whole cannot be formed of rotten parts, he devotes much of his treatise
to family education and government. Would that modern statesmen,
philosophers and politicians, would become practical like Aristotle, and
not attempt to build social and political edifices, until they were sure
of the soundness of the materials of which they would construct them. As
all human beings live for the greatest part of their lives in families,
it is all important that they should look to the wise arrangement of
this old and universal institution.
We wish to prove that the great movement in society, known under various
names, as Communism, Socialism, Abolitionism, Red Republicanism and
Black Republicanism, has one common object: the breaking up of all law
and government, and the inauguration of anarchy, and that the
destruction of the family is one of the means in which they all concur
to attain a common end. We shall quote only from Stephen Pearle Andrews,
because he is by far the ablest and best informed of American Socialists
and Reformers, and because he cites facts and authorities to show that
he presents truly the current thought and the general intention. Mr.
Andrews is a Massachusetts gentleman, who has lived at the South. He has
been an Abolition Lecturer. He is the disciple of Warren, who is the
disciple of Owen of Lanark and New Harmony. Owen and Warren are Socrates
and Plato, and he is the Great Stygarite, as far surpassing them, as
Aristotle surpassed Socrates and Plato. But it is not merely his
theories on which we rely; he cites historical facts that show that the
tendency and terminus of all abolition is to the sovereignty of the
individual, the breaking up of families, and no-government. He delivered
a series of lectures to the elite of New York on this subject, which met
with approbation, and from which we shall quote. He established, or
aided to establish, Free Love Villages, and headed a Free Love Saloon
in the city of New York, patronized and approved by the "Higher
classes." He is indubitably the philosopher and true exponent of
Northern Abolitionism. With this assertion, which none who read his
Science of Society we think will deny, we proceed to quote from his able
and beautiful lectures, embodied in a publication entitled "Science of
Society." Our first quotation is from his first lecture and the first
chapter of his work:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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