Superiority of Southern Races [pp. 369-381]

SUPERIORITY OF SOUTHERN RACES.
than government itself. Dynasties may pass away, republics
and mnonarchies perish, all other human institutions be de stroyed-but religion will last as long as man.
There is no infidelity in our Confederacy. Peligion is
universal. It binds us together, and makes us one patriotic
and moral people. If the pockets of our soldiers slain in battle
were searched, prayer books and hymn books would often be
found; in none free-love epistles.
We start under good auspices. A religious people ourselves,
we are represented by an executive that unites withl wisdom,
foresight and courage a pure morality and becoming piety.
We find very little in our author's work from which we
dissent, except his theory that the civilizations of France,
England and America are Teutonic. The laws, language and
personal appearance of the French show that their chaiacter
is chiefly P,omn,; for we entirely concur with our author that
the blood or ancestry of a people determines its intellectual
capacity, its turn or genius, and its relative state of civilization.
The people of our Southern Confederacy are not of Teutonic
descent, but chiefly descended firom the Mediterranean inations.
Like the:Romans, they are averse to commerce and manufactures, addicted to agriculture and fond of war.
But we go further, and maintain that there never was, and
according to our author's theory never could be, othler than extremely low Teutonic civilization. The great effort of his book
is to slow that you cannot en(r,aft civilization upon a people
except by infilsing into it new blood-in fact, chlanging or modifyingl) the race. The Germans were barbarians in the days of
Tacitus and Cwsar, and as such remained until after the Selavonic conquest. Their present (- ivilization is Selavonic, not
Teutonic. We will grive a long extract firom our author, and
shlow thereby that he cannot escape this conclusion:
"The idea of an innate an(l permanenrt difference in the moral and
mental endowments of the various groups of the human species, is one of
the most ancient, as well as universally adopted opinions. With few exceptions, and those mostly in our own times, it has formed the basis of
almost all political theories, and has been the fundamental maxim of government of every nation, great or small. The prejudices of country have
no other cause; each nation believes in its own superiority over its neighbor, and very often different parts of the same nation regard each other
with contempt. There seems to exist an instinctive antipathy among the
different races, and even among the subdivisions of the same race, of
which none is entirely exempt, but which acts with the greatest force in
the least civilized or least civilizable. WAVe behold it in the characteristic
suspiciousness and hostility of the savage; in the isolation from foreign
influence and inter(ourse of the Chinese and Japanese; in the various distinctions founded upon birth in more civilized communities, such as castes,
orders of nobility and aristocratic privileges. Not even a common religion
can extinguish the here(litary aversion of the Arab to the Turk, of the
Kurd to the Nestorian of Syria, or the bitter hostility of the Magyar and
Selave, who, without intermingling, have inhabited the same country for
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