In the 'Discourse on Negro Slavery' we see this
devilish philosophy in full bloom. The gods, he tells us, are with the
strong. Might has a divine right to rule,--blessed are the crafty of
brain and strong of hand! Weakness is crime. "Vae victis!" as Brennus
said when he threw his sword into the scale,--Woe to the conquered! The
negro is weaker in intellect than his "born lord," the white man, and has
no right to choose his own vocation. Let the latter do it for him, and,
if need be, return to the "beneficent whip." "On the side of the
oppressor there is power;" let him use it without mercy, and hold flesh
and blood to the grindstone with unrelenting rigor. Humanity is
squeamishness; pity for the suffering mere "rose-pink sentimentalism,"
maudlin and unmanly. The gods (the old Norse gods doubtless) laugh to
scorn alike the complaints of the miserable and the weak compassions and
"philanthropisms" of those who would relieve them. This is the substance
of Thomas Carlyle's advice; this is the matured fruit of his philosophic
husbandry,--the grand result for which he has been all his life sounding
unfathomable abysses or beating about in the thin air of
Transcendentalism.
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