Man cannot be said to be in possession of all things that he, or such
theorists, may deem his rights only in a monocratic state. But how will
he retain them? For then, so far as he shall have intercourse with
others, every thing will come to be decided by the law of _might_; so
that, instead of gaining, he will lose all rights. But suppose him to
live without intercourse; what is a naked, abstract right, that yields
him nothing above the brute? God never made a man for such a state of
life; because it at once includes rebellion to his government; and,
therefore, its every movement will be to retrograde.
Will the disciples of Dr. Channing be surprised to find that the only
medicine God has prepared for such a loathsome moral disease as will
then be developed, is slavery to a higher order of men?
------------------
LESSON VI.
Dr. Channing’s third position is to offer explanations to prevent
misapplication of the principles presented in his first two
propositions.
Vol. ii. page 51, he says—“Sympathy with the slave has often degenerated
into injustice towards the master.” We fully agree with him; and we also
admit “that the consciences of men are often darkened by education.”
This short chapter is evidently written in a spirit of conciliation, and
contains many truths eloquently told; yet, he finally grasps his
doctrines, and repeats his elucidations.
His fourth position is, “To unfold the evils of slavery.” He says the
first great evil is the debasement of the slave. Page 60: “This word,
(slave,) borrowed from his condition, expresses the ruin wrought by
slavery within him. * * * To be an instrument of the physical, material
good of another, whose will is his highest law, he is taught to regard
as the great purpose of his being. Here lies the evil of slavery. Its
whips, imprisonment, and even the horrors of the middle passage from
Africa to America, these are not to be named in comparison with this
extinction of the proper consciousness of a human being, with the
degradation of a man into a brute.”
If it be a fact that the debasement of the negro race has been brought
about by their having been made slaves in America; then it will be a
very strong argument, we are willing to acknowledge, an insurmountable
one, against the institution. That Dr. Channing thinks such to be the
fact, we have no doubt; for we cannot a moment admit that he would
assert what he did not believe was true. But “the consciences of men are
often darkened by education.” We hold that the assertion is capable of
proof, that the debasement of the race was the moral, the necessary
effect of a long course of sin; and that, instead of slavery producing
the debasement, the fact is, the debasement produced the slavery; or, in
other words, slavery is the moral, the necessary effect of the
debasement.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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