The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 13, November, 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 13, November, 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Mr. Cushing represents Massachusetts to be a Babel of _isms_, so
many square miles of Bedlam, from Boston Corner to Provincetown. Is
this intended as a depreciation of our free institutions, by showing
the results to which they inevitably lead? Has a Rarey for vicious
hobbies been a _desideratum_ so long, and has such a benefactor of
his species found his avatar at last in Mr. Cushing? He tells us,
however, that the delusion of _Negrophilism_, that is, Republicanism,
is on the wane, and is destined to speedy extinction. The very
extravagancies he speaks of as so rife and so rampant are to us
evidence of the contrary. They prove the depth to which the
religious instincts of the Northern people have been stirred upon
the question of Slavery. Such extravagancies have accompanied every
great moral movement of mankind. The Reformation, the great Puritan
Rebellion, the French Revolution, brought them forth in swarms. A
profound historical thinker, Gervinus, remarks, that the political
enthusiasm of a nation is slow to warm and swift to cool, but that
its moral enthusiasm is quickly stirred and long in subsiding.
Thinking men will ask themselves whether the _isms_ Mr. Cushing
enumerates be not the external symptoms of such an enthusiasm,--and
whether it be wise, under the names of "Nationality" and "Conservatism,"
to urge aggressions to the point where it becomes the right and the
duty of men to consider the terrible necessity of a change in their
system of government; whether it be unpatriotic to resist the
extension of a system which makes the mass of the population an
element of danger and weakness in the body politic, as its advocates
admit by their scheme for a foreign protectorate of their proposed
independent organization,--a system which renders public education
impossible, exhausts the soil, necessitates sparseness of population,
and demoralizes the governing classes.[4]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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