Chapter VII: Independence

A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.

If the scale of precedence in the mental development of our fellow-creatures can be determined by any single test, that test is the instinctive love of Independence. Many of the lower animals may surprise us by constructive achievements that rival the products of human science, but their instinct of freedom is quite imperfectly developed. The caterpillar of the silk-moth will spin its satin winter-gown in a box full of mulberry leaves as skilfully as in the freedom of the tropical forests. In the hive of their captor a swarm of wild bees will continue to build hexagons and store up honey as diligently as in the rocks or hollow trees of the wilderness. Captive river-fish will eat and pair a day after their transfer to a fishpond. Birds, on the other hand, mourn their lost liberty for weeks. During the first half-month of its captivity, a caged hawk rarely accepts any food; sea-birds and eagles starve with a persistence as if they were thus trying to end an affliction from which they see no other way of escape. Wild cows can be domesticated in a month; wild elephants hardly in a year. Several species of the larger carnivora can be trained only if caught in their cub-hood, as in after years they become almost wholly untamable. The lower varieties of quadrumana, the Brazilian capuchin monkeys and East Indian macaques, seem almost to invite capture by the frequency of their visits to the neighborhood of human dwellings, while the apes proper are, without any exception, the shyest creatures of the virgin woods. The gorilla is so rarely seen in the vicinity of human settlements that its very existence was long considered doubtful. Sir Stamford Raffles asserts that at the distant sound of an ax the orang of Sumatra at once abandons its favorite haunts in the coast jungles. On the west coast of Borneo a large orang was once surprised by the crew of an English trading-vessel, but fought with a desperation that obliged its would-be captors to riddle it with rifle-balls, though they knew that a living specimen of that size would be worth its weight in silver.

That same resolution in defense of their liberties has always distinguished the nobler from the baser tribes of the human race. The natives of the Gambia Valley have no hesitation in selling their relatives to the Portuguese slave-traders, while the liberation of a single countryman (whom the enemy had determined to hold as a hostage) impelled the Circassian highlanders to risk their lives in a series of desperate assaults upon the ramparts of a Russian frontier post. The hope of covering the retreat of their fleeing wives and children inspired the heroes of Thermopylæ to make a stand against six-thousandfold odds. The crimps of the Christian church-despots found no difficulty in foisting their yoke upon the former vassals of the Roman empire, but when they attempted to cross the border of the Saxon Landmark, the kidnappers were slain like rabid wolves; and when the neighboring ruffian-counts, and at last Charlemagne in person, marched to the support of the clerical slave-hunters, they met with a resistance the record of which will forever remain the proudest page in the chronicle of the Germanic races. Cornfields were burnt, villages were leveled with the ground; for hundreds of miles the means of human subsistence were utterly destroyed; but the council of the Saxon chieftains refused to submit, and when the homes of their forefathers were devastated, they carried their children to the inaccessible wilds of the Harz highlands, where they grimly welcomed the aid of the winter snows, and defied frost and starvation, rather than crawl to cross (zu Kreuze kriechen), as their vernacular stigmatized the cowardice of their crucifix-kissing neighbors. And when the Frankish autocrat had shackled their land with a chain of forts, they thrice rebelled with persistent disregard of consequences; nay, after the loss of the last murderous battle, the prisoners of war refused to accept the ultimatum of the conqueror, and rather than crawl to cross four thousand of their captive noblemen mounted the scaffold of the executioner on the market-square of Quedlinburg. The bodies of the heroes were thrown to the birds of the wilderness; but their deathless spirits revived in the philippics of Martin Luther and the battle-shout of Lützen and Oudenaarde, and will yet ride the storm destined to hurl the last cross from the temples of the Germanic nations.

B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.

Since the dawn of history the lands of freedom have produced fruits and flowers that refused to thrive on any other soil. For several centuries civilization was confined to a small country of republics: Attic and Theban Greece. “Study the wonders of that age,” says Byron to his friend Trelawney, “and compare them with the best ever done under masters.” Switzerland, in spite of its rocky soil, has for centuries been the happiest, as well as the freest, country of Europe. The prosperity of the United States of America, since the establishment of their independence, stands unparalleled in the history of the last eighteen hundred years; and, moreover, the degree of that prosperity has been locally proportioned to the degree of social freedom, and has begun to become general only since the general abolition of slavery. Freedom blesses the poorest soil, as despotism blights the most fertile, and it is only an apparent exception from that rule that Italy continued to flourish during the first two centuries of the empire. The change in the form of government was at first nominal, rather than real, and under the rule of Augustus, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, Rome enjoyed more real liberty than many a so-called republic of modern times. When despotism became a systematic and chronic actuality, the sun of fortune was soon eclipsed, and the social climate became as unfavorable to art and literature as to valor and patriotism.

Personal independence is a not less essential condition of individual happiness. Bondage in any form, and of silken or gilded, as well as of iron, fetters, is incompatible with the development of the highest mental and moral faculties. The genius of Poland and modern Italy has produced its best fruit in exile. The progress of modern civilization dates only from the time when knowledge once more flourished in a Republic of Letters; and for a thousand years the monastery system of medieval literature produced hardly a single work of genius. Within the period of the last three or four generations the sun of freedom has ripened better and more abundant fruit in any single decade than the dungeon-air of despotism during a series of centuries. All foreign travelers agree in admiring (or condemning) the early mental development of American children, who have a chance to exercise their intellectual faculties in an area untrammeled by the barriers of caste divisions and social restraints. They may yield to the pupils of the best European colleges in special branches of scholarship, but in common sense, general intelligence, general information, in self-respect, in practical versatility and self-dependence, an American boy of twelve is, as a rule, more than a match for a continental-European boy of sixteen; and the same holds good of the average intelligence and self-dependence of our country population. With the rarest exceptions the political economists of our Southern states agree that the agricultural negro as a freeman is a more valuable laborer than as a slave, and that emancipation, in the long run, has benefited the planter as well as his serf. I venture even to add the verdict of Professor Hagenbeck, the founder of the great zoölogical supply depot, that menagerie-trainers of the least despotic methods are the most successful. Turf-men know that the best horses do not come from the unequaled perennial pastures of the lower Danube, but from England and Araby, where pet colts enjoy almost the freedom of a pet child.

C.—PERVERSION.

The ethics of Anti-naturalism include the Buddhistic doctrine of self-abasement, as an indispensable condition of salvation. That salvation meant extinction, the utter renunciation of earthly hopes and desires, the mortification of all natural instincts, including the instinct of freedom. Abject submission to injustice, the subordination of reason to dogma, the sinfulness of rebellion against the “powers that be,” were inculcated with a zeal that made the church an invaluable ally of despotism. For centuries a scepter combining the form of a cross and a bludgeon was the significant emblem of tyranny. With the aid, nay, in the name, of the Christian hierarchy, the despots of the Middle Ages elaborated a system of subordination of personal freedom to autocratic caprices, which, by comparison, makes the tyranny of the Cæsars a model of liberalism. Every important function of social and domestic life was subjected to the control of arbitrary functionaries, armed with irresponsible power or with a system of oppressive penal by-laws. Censors suppressed every symptom of visible or audible protest. Every school was a prison, every judgment-seat a star-chamber. Peasants and mechanics had no voice in the councils of their rulers. The merit of official employees was measured by the degree of their flunkeyism. But the ne-plus-ultras of physical and moral despotism were combined in the slavery of the monastic convents. The attempt of reviving the outrages which abbots for centuries practiced on the unfortunates whom a rash vow (or often the mandate of a bigoted parent) had submitted to their power, would certainly expose the manager of a modern convent to the risk of being mobbed and torn limb from limb. Novices were subjected to all sorts of wanton tortures and arbitrary deprivation of his scant privileges; they were compelled to perform shameful and ridiculous acts of self-abasement, all merely to “break their worldly spirit,” i.e., crush out the last vestige of self-respect and life-love, in order to prepare them for the consolations of other-worldliness. The moral emasculation of the human race seems, indeed, to have been the main purpose of the educational policy which the priests of the Nature-hating Galilean pursued wherever the union of Church and State put children and devotees at the mercy of their dogmatists.

D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.

Voluntary slavery means voluntary renunciation of the chief privilege of human reason: the privilege of self-control. The spendthrift divests himself of external advantages; the miser yields up his life-blood for gold; but he who surrenders his personal liberty has sold his soul, as well as his body. Bondage circumscribes every sphere of activity. Political despotism impedes the progress of industry as galling fetters impede the circulation of the blood. Enterprising autocrats of the Frederic and Peter type have as utterly failed in the attempt of enforcing a flourishing state of commerce, as they would have failed in the attempt of enforcing the growth of a stunted tree by the tension of iron chains. In free America a voluntary pledge of abstinence has accomplished what in medieval Europe the most Draconic temperance and anti-tobacco laws failed to achieve.

The educational despotism of moral pedants has ever defeated its own purpose, and succeeded only in turning frank, merry-souled children into hypocrites and sneaks. The idea that a barbarous system of military discipline could develop model warriors has been refuted on hundreds of battle-fields, where the machine-soldiers of despotic kings were routed by the onset of enthusiastic patriots, half-trained, perhaps, and ill-armed, but assembled by an enlistment of souls as well as of bodies. The unparalleled intellectual barrenness of the Middle Ages was well explained by the indictment of a modern English poet. “The bondage of the Christian doctrine,” says Percy Shelley, “is fatal to the development of originality and genius.” The curse of mediocrity has, indeed, for ages rested upon every literary product devoted to the promotion of clerical interests. The Muses refuse to assemble on Golgotha. Pegasus declines to be yoked with the ass of the Galilean ascetic. Outspoken skepticism is almost as rare as true genius, and it is not possible to mistake the significance of the fact that the great poets and philosophers of the last seven generations were, almost without an exception, persistent and outspoken skeptics. Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, Holbach, Leibnitz, Lessing, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schiller, Heine, Schopenhauer, Humboldt, Pope, Hume, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Gibbon, Buckle, and Darwin have all inscribed their names in the temple o! Liberalism; and Wolfgang Goethe, the primate of European literature, was at once the most consistent and the most anti-Christian of modern thinkers. “His personal appearance,” says Heinrich Heine, “was as harmonious as his mind. A proudly erect body, never yet bent by Christian worm-humility; classic features, never distorted by Christian contrition; eyes that had never been dimmed by Christian sinner-tears or the apathy of monkish resignation.”

That resignation was for centuries enforced as the first of moral duties; but Nature has had her revenge, and even the fallen hierarchy would hesitate to recover the loss of their prestige by a return to the moral desert which for ages marked the empire of a mind-enslaving dogma.

E.—REFORM.

Not all slaves can be freed by breaking their shackles; the habit of servitude may become a hereditary vice, too inveterate for immediate remedies. The pupils of Freedom’s school may be required to unlearn, as well as to learn, many lessons; the temples of the future will have to remove several aphoristic tablets to make room for such mottoes as “Self-Reliance,” “Liberty,” “Independence.” Victor Jacquemont tells a memorable story of a Hindoo village, almost depopulated by a famine caused by the depredations of sacred monkeys, that made constant raids on the fields and gardens of the superstitious peasants, who would see their children starve to death rather than lift a hand against the long-tailed saints. At last the British stadtholder saw a way to relieve their distress. He called a meeting of their sirdars and offered them free transportation to a monkeyless island of the Malay archipelago. Learning that the land of the proposed colony was fertile and thinly settled, the survivors accepted the proposal with tears of gratitude; but when the band of gaunt refugees embarked at the mouth of the Hooghly, the stadtholder’s agent was grieved to learn that their cargo of household goods included a large cageful of sacred monkeys. “They are beyond human help,” says the official memorandum, “and their children can be redeemed only by curing them of the superstition that has ruined their monkey-ridden ancestors.”

At the end of the fifteenth century, when southern Europe was in danger of a similar fate from the rapacity of esurient priests and monks, Providence, by means of an agent called Christoval Columbus, offered the victims the chance of a free land of refuge; but when the host of emigrants embarked at the harbor of Palos, philosophers must have been grieved to perceive that their cargo of household-pets comprised a large assortment of ecclesiastics. “They are beyond human help,” Experience might sigh in the words of the British commissioner, “and their children can be redeemed only by curing them of the superstition that has proved the ruin of their priest-ridden ancestors.”

In regions of our continent where colonists might live as independent as the birds of their primeval forests, bondage has been imported in the form of an intriguing hierarchy, working its restless bellows to forge the chains of their pupils—of the rising generation, who as yet seem to hesitate at the way-fork of Feudalism and Reform. A timely word may decide their choice, and, by all the remaining hopes of Earth and Mankind! that word shall not remain unspoken.