the continent, as that vegetation should spring from granite, or animals exist without atmospheric air; and, therefore, thrusting the negro from his natural sphere into unnatural relations with the white man, necessarily destroys the latter, and drives the other into his inherent and original Africanism.

31

The delusion, the folly, or the fraud of Wilberforce and his associates, in presenting a false issue to their own wronged and oppressed millions, and thus diverting their attention from their own oppressions to the imaginary sufferings of negroes and other subordinate races, is so transcendent, its magnitude so enormous, that we have no terms in our language that can express it; but great and indeed awful as may be this wrong on the white man, it is in some respects really surpassed by the evils, if not the wrongs, inflicted on the negro. More than one million of negroes are believed to have perished, through the means resorted to to suppress the slave trade; and now it is admitted that those attempts have not prevented the importation of one single negro! The world needed the products of the tropics; the labor of a certain number of negroes was needed to furnish these products; and therefore, when fifty thousand were required in Cuba, eighty thousand were shipped on the African coast, thus leaving a margin of thirty thousand to be destroyed by interference with the laws of demand and supply. Who can contemplate these frightful results without awe, and sorrow, and pity, not alone for the victims, but for the authors of such wide-spread 32and boundless calamity. The crusades of the middle ages are now recognized as utterly baseless—simple human delusions, in which millions of lives were sacrificed, not to an idea, but to a false assumption—an assumption that the Holy Sepulchre could be recovered at Jerusalem. That crusade of “humanity,” in behalf of the subordinate races, set up by Wilberforce and his associates in modern times, is also a simple delusion, based on a false assumption, the assumption that negroes are black-white men, or men like ourselves, and though not so fatal to human life as the former, its effects or influences on human welfare are vastly and immeasurably more deplorable.

32

Such is the great “anti-slavery” delusion of our times. It is wholly European and monarchical in its origin; and leaving out of view all other considerations, its mere existence among us, or that any considerable number of Americans could be so deluded and mentally so degraded, as to embrace it, will astonish posterity to the latest generations. We are in contact with 

 Prev. P 15/239 next