The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 17, March, 1859: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 17, March, 1859: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Has not a Supreme Court in one of
our States lately denied to a negro even the right to choose between
liberty and slavery,--the choice being left to him by his deceased
master,--because the creature (which, when doing wrong, is responsible
and has a will imputed to him) has no will to choose, because it cannot
have any, says the Supreme Court of that State?
However, it will doubtless be objected by some, that it is simply
disgusting to eat our fellow-creatures of the same species,--that it is
unnatural and against our religion,--and that so remarkable a diversity
of taste can be explained only on the ground of our belonging to
different races. We do not believe that the Fijians belong to a
different race. Fijian, or Fijician, results, by a slight change of
letters, from the word Phoenician; and there can be no doubt that
the Fijians are descendants of those Phoenicians who, according to
Herodotus, sailed, in the reign of the Egyptian King Necho, from the
Persian Gulf round the Cape of Good Hope, and entered the Mediterranean
through the Pillars of Hercules. How they came to be wafted to the
opposite hemisphere is not for us to explain, nor do we know it. Suffice
it to say, that Fijician and Phoenician are the same word. Possibly old
Admiral Hanno preceded Captain Cook. Who can prove the contrary?
As to the first of these objections, we admit that some people may
feel a degree of aversion to _roast-homme_; but so does the Mahometan
abominate roast "short pig"; and a Brahmin, taken to Cincinnati and its
environs, at the sanguinary hog-murder time, would die outright, of
horror. We almost died, ourselves, at the sickening sight of that
porcian massacre. _De gustibus non est disputantibus_, as our colonel
used to say. Disgust, is the result of a special treaty of amity and
reciprocity between the stomach and the imagination, differing according
to difference in the contracting parties. We have known many persons
who would not touch mutton, and others who would rather starve than eat
oysters; while we ourselves revolt at sourkrout, which, nevertheless,
millions of Germans, French, and Americans consider delicious. Disgust
is arbitrary; it does not furnish us with a philosophical ground for
argumentation. The Fijian does not feel disgust at the flavor of a
well-roasted white sailor; and as long as he does not insist upon our
relishing his fare, what right have we to ask him to feel disgusted?
When the panther-tailed Aztec priest fattened his prisoner, or carried
along the children decked with wreaths, soon to be smothered in their
own juice, he cannot have felt disgust, any more than the Malay, of whom
Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles tells us, that, with epicurean refinement,
he cut the choicest bits from his living prisoner, in order to baste
them to a turn and season them with choice pepper.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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