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Page 7
After this the Chartist agitation ebbed away. The movement was said to
be a failure; but it failed, not because of the political principles
on which it was founded, but because those principles had in the
meantime been acknowledged and applied. At least three of the six
articles of the Chartist charter were soon adopted by Parliament. The
principle of Manhood Suffrage is virtually a part of the English
Constitution. The right of voting by Secret Ballot, deposited in a
ballot-box, has also been acknowledged as a part of the _modus
operandi_ of all British elections. In like manner the Property
Qualification formerly imposed on candidates for Parliament, against
which the Chartists so vehemently and justly declaimed, has long since
been abolished.
THE ABOLITION OF HUMAN BONDAGE.
Certainly no greater deed of philanthropy has been accomplished by
mankind than the extinction of human servitude. True, that horrible
relic of antiquity has not yet been wholly obliterated from the world,
but the nineteenth century has dealt upon it such staggering and fatal
blows as have driven it from all the high places of civilization and
made it crouch in obscure corners and unenlightened regions on the
outskirts of paganism. Slavery has not indeed been extinguished; but
it is scotched, and must expire. According to the tendency of things,
the sun in his course at the middle of the twentieth century will
hardly light the hovel of a single slave!
The opening of the modern era found slavery universally distributed.
There was perhaps at the middle of the eighteenth century not a
single non-slave-holding race or nation on the globe! All were alike
brutalized by the influences and traditions of the ancient system. All
were familiar with it--aye, they were nursed by it; for it has been
one of the strange aspects of human life that the children of the free
have been nursed by the mothers of the enslaved. All races, we repeat,
were alike poisoned with the venom of the serpent. Thus poisoned were
France and Germany. Thus poisoned was England; and thus also our
colonies. Time was, even down to the dawn of the Revolution, when
every American colony was slave-holding. Time was when the system was
taught in the schools and preached in the pulpits of all the civilized
world.
It was about the Revolutionary epoch, that is, the last quarter of the
eighteenth century, when the conscience of men began to be active on
the subject of human bondage. We think that the disposition to
recognize the wickedness and impolity of slavery was a part of the
general movement which came on in civilization, tending to
revolutionize not only the political but the social and ethical
condition of mankind. We know well that in our own country, when our
political institutions were in process of formation slavery was
courageously challenged. It was not challenged more audaciously in
the Northern than in the Southern colonies. Some of the latter, as,
for example, Georgia, had at the first excluded slavery as a thing
intolerable to freedom and righteousness. The leading men of the old
Southern States at the close of the last century nearly all repudiated
slavery in principle. They admitted it only in practice and because it
was a part of their inheritance. The patriots, both North and South,
were averse not only to the extension of the area of bondage, but to
the existence of it as a fact.
Washington was at heart an anti-slavery man. He wished in his heavy
but wholly patriotic way as heartily as Lincoln wished that all men
might enjoy the blessings of freedom. Jefferson was almost radical on
the question. Though he did not heartily believe in an overruling
Providence, he felt the need of one when he considered the afflictive
system of slavery with which his State and country were encumbered. He
said that considering it he trembled when he remembered that God is
just.
Meanwhile the unprofitableness of slavery in the Northern colonies had
co-operated with the conscience of Puritanism to engender a sentiment
against slavery in that part of the Union. So, although the
institution was tolerated in the Constitution and even had guarantees
thrown around it, it was, nevertheless, disfavored in our fundamental
law. One may readily see how the patriots labored with this portentous
question. Already in Great Britain an anti-slavery sentiment had
appeared. There were anti-slavery leaders, statesmen, philosophers and
philanthropists. By the terms of the Constitution the slave _trade_
should cease in the year 1808. Sad to reflect that the inventive
genius of man and the prodigality of nature in her gifts of cotton,
sugar and rice to the old South should have produced a reaction in
favor of slavery so great as to fasten it more strongly than ever upon
our country.
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