Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 by Various

Author:Various
Format: epub
Publisher: Munsey's

OUR GOVERNMENT AND THE BLACKS.

All thoughtful minds are profoundly conscious that the problems of war are not the last and most important to be solved in our national affairs. It is clear enough that this great convulsion must end; and end, too, in the total extinction of that stupendous system of iniquity in the interests of which it was projected. President Lincoln's Proclamation of emancipation throughout rebeldom, and the recent order to enlist the slaves throughout the Border States in military service to the Government, emancipating all thus enlisted, whether slaves of loyal or disloyal masters, with the certainty that there is to be no cessation to the grand achievements of our arms short of the completest success, all conspire to assure us that the dreadful disorder hitherto consuming our national vitals is to pass finally away in the convulsive disease of its last throes, so distressing to us all. It being thus certain that this consecrated crime is to be dismantled, dishonored, and abandoned forever, the question is forced upon us: 'What is to be done with the negroes?' Some four millions of human beings, doomed to remorseless servitude, denied the static force of social law, forbidden by positive law the rights of education, through which alone are attained the culture and refinement of real manhood—these are the 'freedmen' just emerging from the most insignificant nonage to the sublime personality of citizenship in a Government of the people. Such being practically their attitude, what are the real demands and needs in the case?

Reputed statesmen, journalists, public speakers, and politicians are all ready enough to determine the matter. 'Let them alone,' say they. 'They are needed where they are; and the respective wants of capital and labor will regulate the intercourse between these simple and uncultured people and the powerful and shrewd men who henceforth are to buy their service.' Such, in our humble opinion, is not the wisdom of sound, healthy statesmanship. Let us see.

We cannot get a complete handling of this matter without first determining the purpose and character of government as a principle; and we cannot determine this without a clear understanding of the laws of the human mind in its historic evolution. We must understand, then, that government is legitimately only an institution in the service of universal man. It is subjective, ministerial, instrumental always ways; aiming only at the interests of the governed; else it contains an element hostile to the Divine order that peacefully directs all movement, and must therefore be disturbed with a commotion that will either restore or destroy it.

We may not hereupon assume that government must necessarily assume only one form; for, being thus subservient to human use, to manly culture, to complete social state, it must infallibly assume forms precisely proportioned to the human conditions to which applied; hence, we must understand the laws of the human mind, which display its varied conditions in the course of its evolution from infancy to manhood, before we can have a clear, scientific conception of the principles, operations, and organic forms of human government.

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