[5] Save for the pleasure of doing so, I need hardly
point put my obligations to Mr. J. S. Mill’s
System of Logic, in this view of scientific
method.
EMANCIPATION—BLACK AND WHITE
[1865.]
Quashie’s plaintive inquiry, “Am I not
a man and a brother?” seems at last to have
received its final reply—the recent decision
of the fierce trial by battle on the other side of
the Atlantic fully concurring with that long since
delivered here in a more peaceful way.
The question is settled; but even those who are most
thoroughly convinced that the doom is just, must see
good grounds for repudiating half the arguments which
have been employed by the winning side; and for doubting
whether its ultimate results will embody the hopes
of the victors, though they may more than realise
the fears of the vanquished. It may be quite
true that some negroes are better than some white men;
but no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes
that the average negro is the equal, still less the
superior, of the average white man. And, if this
be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his
disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative
has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor,
he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained
and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to
be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The
highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation will
assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins,
though it is by no means necessary that they should
be restricted to the lowest. But whatever the
position of stable equilibrium into which the laws
of social gravitation may bring the negro, all responsibility
for the result will henceforward lie between Nature
and him. The white man may wash his hands of
it, and the Caucasian conscience be void of reproach
for evermore. And this, if we look to the bottom
of the matter, is the real justification for the abolition
policy.
The doctrine of equal natural rights may be an illogical
delusion; emancipation may convert the slave from
a well-fed animal into a pauperised man; mankind may
even have to do without cotton shirts; but all these
evils must be faced if the moral law, that no human
being can arbitrarily dominate over another without
grievous damage to his own nature, be, as many think,
as readily demonstrable by experiment as any physical
truth. If this be true, no slavery can be abolished
without a double emancipation, and the master will
benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.
The like considerations apply to all the other questions
of emancipation which are at present stirring the
world—the multifarious demands that classes
of mankind shall be relieved from restrictions imposed
by the artifice of man, and not by the necessities
of Nature. One of the most important, if not
the most important, of all these, is that which daily
threatens to become the “irrepressible”
woman question. What social and political rights
have women? What ought they to be allowed, or
not allowed, to do, be, and suffer? And, as involved
in, and underlying all these questions, how ought they
to be educated?
