What's to Be Done with the Negroes? [pp. 577-581]

WHAT'S TO BE DONE WITH THE NEGROES.
destiny. He has been a soldier without warring on women
and children, and without adding to the profession of arms the
profession of the hangman or the jailer. He is a statesman
who scorns the jealousies of a partizan, and a conqueror who
does not assert the "divine right" to persecute those who honestly opposed him, and he is a monarch whose name itself is a
victory for peace, magnanimity and knowledge; and who is
now admitted as equal in letters to the high distinction he has
long since attained in statesmanship and in arms. True, in this
book the Lion has painted and has portrayed himself astride
of men; but we are only glad that when the French called for
a ruler, Jupiter sent down, not a log that did nothing; nor a
stork that eat them up, but a Lion, whose roar is never heard
and whose claws are never seen except by their enemies.
ART. II.-WHAT'S TO BE DONE WITH THE NEGROES?
THIS question would be easy enough to answer if the radical leaders of the North, who have almost entire control of the
subject,- possessed one vestige of faith; faith in the past, in
the prescriptive, in human nature, in human experience, in
human laws and institutions, in human habits and customs,
in legal analogies, in divine commands, in fine, had they
faith in anything. But they have faith in nothing, and wildly
and rashly speculate about everything. They are Rationalists
all. And rationalism means, or inevitably leads to infidelity
in all things. He who makes reason his sole guide, who will
accept nothing that does not concur with his reason, must
find, if he be capable of logical analysis and concatenated
ratiocination, that he will have to reject every thing in the
material and in the moral world as false, spurious, nay, as
ion-existent. Everything that does exist, or that we believe to
exist, is unreasonable, simply because it is super-reasonable.
Reason, boldly, fearlessly, profanely applied to the universe
itself, dissolves the universe into thin, airy nothing, and
leaves a few vagrant Ideas floating through the immensity of
space. He is no philosopher, but an ignorant charlatan, who
has not reasoned himself to this conclusion, who has not discovered, that all reasoning, which does not adopt faith for its
premises, if pushed to its ultimate consequences, leads to gross
fallacy and glaring absurdity.
But the Goddess of Reason is as devotedly worshipped by
our Northern rulers, as she ever was by the canaille, the
statesmen and philosophers of Paris in the days of Robespierre and the guillotine.
Our rulers are rationalists, and rationalism is the appalling
VOL. I.-NO. VL 37
577