Part 5

The moral and mental growth of those Africans who were formerly slaves in the British West Indies, shows the possibility of negro culture under the influence of freedom. The official reports of the various governors of these islands, show that, since emancipation, there has been a rapid and steady growth of their prosperity; and the absolute veracity which characterizes these reports of English agents to their government cannot for a moment be doubted. In some of the islands, such as Nassau and others, the products and revenues have increased a hundred-fold, while the cost of administration (for keeping protective fleets and repressive soldiery, needed now no more) has greatly diminished. They also certify to a great increase in the imports from England--their mother country in the noblest sense of the word. Even the _export_ of sugar is nearly equal to what it was under the forced labor of slavery, while _its intrinsic production has vastly increased_--the domestic consumption far surpassing what it was in the palmiest days of the planters. These are facts which only hypocrisy can pervert, or perversion conceal.

With reference also to the question of the "viability" and longevity of hybrids, mulattoes, etc., science protests against the fallacy which the new pro-slavery apostles advocate. Facts confirm the deductions of genuine science, and explode the fallacies of its counterfeit. The Dominican Republic is almost entirely composed of a mulatto population, which is now in its second or third generation, if not older. Neither are these mulattoes dying out, but they are increasing by and within themselves. No human white stallions are imported there from slave-breeding regions to correct or keep up the breed.

If, however, there should still linger a presumption of the superiority of the white over the black man, it must speedily vanish when the arguments of the militant upholders of slavery--whether they be in senatorial togas, in priestly robes, or in printer's ink--are subjected to the analysis of impartial philosophy or common logic. A spurious and depraved civilization is far more dangerous and degrading to society, and more truly evidences positive mental inferiority, than does the absence of civilization or the primitive savage condition. And this is the more true when the subjects of such a spurious civilization have within reach the elements of a genuine moral and social culture, but at the same time spurn and depreciate them all. Such persons, whatever may be their conventional position or ethnic descent, whatever the color of their skin, the form of their skull, or the nature of their hair, are singly and collectively inferior to the uncultivated and oppressed and hence degraded negro; while in respect of justice, manhood, and all that is ennobling, they make no approach to the millions of industrious and intelligent farmers and free yeomanry, artisans, and mechanics of the free states, still less with the higher manifestations of these qualities in great and generous minds.

Neither in the Mosaic record, therefore, nor the native sense of morality, still less in science, can any support be found for the fallacies propounded by the apostles of American slavery. Science, just and elevated in its intrinsic nature, deduces conclusions and establishes laws with sublime impartiality, extenuating naught, and setting down naught in malice. The normal character of every science, always and forever, is _emancipatory_. Science emancipates the mind from prejudices, falsehoods, and superstitions, and from the tyranny exercised over man by the elements and forces of nature, as well as from the far more malignant forces of social oppression. It is doubtless this divine character of true science which makes it so repulsive to the apostles of human degradation.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 7: The old colonial customs and legal regulations in America, fully confirm the above statements. _White_ servants, with or without indenture, were kept in bondage by their masters, as were other chattels, and sometimes, though rarely, these servants were even sold. Without, therefore, going back to any European origin, it may be peremptorily asserted that it is comparatively a short time since the sires of many haughty militant slavery defenders were bondsmen on American soil.]

[Footnote 8: Flavius Josephus says, that under the Herods, Judea contained double the population established by the census of David. Perhaps this account is exaggerated; but, at any rate, it shows a great and positive increase.]

VI.

NABATHEANS.

AUTHORITIES:

_Lassen, Quatremère, Laborde, Oppert, Chwolsohn, Perceval, etc._

In the gray morning of time, behind the obscurity hovering over the origin of Assyria, and preceding even the first great epoch of Babylon, dawns the fully-developed Nabathean civilization. In proportion as scientific investigation imagines it has reached a positive epoch in the ethnology and history of our race, a new cloud ever rises behind it, which is but of this service--unerringly to indicate the limits of the space already investigated. Thus legends, traditions, and tracings sink helpless and hopeless into mythus, and the investigator is lost in the "dark backward and abysm of time." The Eastern legends hanging over Fore-Asia (or the lands between the Himalayas and Assyria), present traditions of epochs and civilizations which had traversed the periods of youth, maturity, and decline, before Brahmins, Assyrians, or Hebrews even dawned on the historical horizon.

The Nabatheans are supposed to have been Shemites or pure Chaldeans.[9] They dwelt in ancient Mesopotamia, between the Euphrates and the Tigris, and also in what afterward constituted a part of Syria and Assyria; and their branches or colonies extended to Arabia and to eastern Mesopotamia. They were probably the primitive white dwellers in these regions, and the founders of Babylon and of her first--almost pre-historic--epoch of glory, down to the time when they were conquered by the Assyrians or by Aryanized Nabatheans and Chaldeans.

According to ancient eastern writers, they invented and taught to their neighbors the art of tilling the soil, and from this circumstance they are said to have derived their name. At all events they were the primitive cultivators of these lands, and agriculture seems to have been their principal pursuit and mode of livelihood. This highly-flourishing Nabathean civilization underlaid the Assyrian and second Babylonian civilizations, and powerfully influenced the primitive Hebrew writers. _Arphaxad_, mentioned in Genesis, signifies in Chaldaic, _stronghold_, _city_, _civilization_, and this, too, at the earliest so-called patriarchal epoch. To the Nabatheans belongs the great work of irrigating Euphratia, by which these heretofore barren and uncultivated plains were made, for more than forty centuries, the most fertile region of the ancient world. It is asserted, too, by the oldest authorities, that their language was highly developed at a time when the other Shemitic tribes and nations only lisped their rude tongue, or attempted to spell the symbols invented, in all probability, by the Nabatheans. Some attribute to them the invention of the arrow-headed characters, while others suppose that the Assyrians (of whom hereafter), first devised them, or at all events, first applied this Tartar invention for the use and preservation of the Nabathean language. Fragments from the writings of Kouthai--a Nabathean, who lived long before the destruction of Nineveh--show that most of the sciences, such as mathematics, astronomy, chronology, etc., were cultivated by them to a high degree, and that they were great lovers of music and other fine arts.

Their historical records are far richer and more complete than any other existing records which relate to those distant and as yet all but incomprehensible epochs and events. In these relics many details of the early life of that time are embodied, principally relating, however, to agriculture, and from which, doubtless, the Greek writers, as Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Strabo, derived their knowledge of the superiority and paramount importance of Nabathean agricultural science, on which, as already remarked, their whole civilization was based. Nowhere, however, in these venerable Nabathean fragments is _slavery_ or the _slave_ ever mentioned, and still less as constituting the basis of domestic husbandry and field labor; but _freemen_ and _freeholders_ only are alluded to as cultivating the land and reaping the rewards of their toil; thus furnishing an additional and most forcible proof that human _slavery is not coeval with the existence of society_.

Indeed, it may be stated as a general rule, clearly confirmed by history, that agriculture never can flourish under slave labor, nor even under villanage. It never did so in antiquity and it never has done so in modern times. In proportion as Egypt, Syria and Assyria fell a prey to political servitude and her twin-sister, or rather generator, domestic slavery, did their agriculture deteriorate and decay. In proportion as the nations of modern Europe have emerged from slavery and serfdom, has agriculture become a civilizing agency, progressive, rational and scientific. England, Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium and Flanders, are living witnesses thereof; and, on the other side, Poland, Russia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Danubian Principalities--all possessed of the most fertile soils--scarce emerge from social, political and rural barbarity. The Moors and the Moriscoes were not slaves when they cultivated Andalusia in a manner never equalled. And what a wide difference between the agriculture of the free and slave sections of the United States! and that too, though the region of slave culture enjoys advantages both in climate and soil. The halting and uncertain advances made in the slave country, are but dimly breaking rays from the free, enlightened northern states.

Thus do the oldest and the newest teach one lesson and tend to one result.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 9: In contradistinction to Aryanized Shemites or Chaldeans, known as Assyrians and Babylonians of the second epoch, and modern Kurdes.

Ethnology and comparative philology everywhere discover similar bifurcations almost at the sources of ethnic life. These bifurcations are explained by natural growth and by the fusion of various tribes and nations. Thus Baktrya, Persia and Media present us with Aryas and Indo-Scythes or Aryanized Tartars. So, too, all primitive races divide and subdivide in the same manner within themselves. The Shemites divided into Chaldeans and Canaanites, and then into Arabs, Hebrews, etc. The Aryas divided first into two groups--the eastern, from which, in turn, sprang the Zend and Sanscrit-speaking Aryas or Iranians and Hindus--and the western group, ancestors of the various European races. Of these latter, one branch immigrated into Greece and Italy, there giving rise again to Ionians and Dorians, Italiots and Latins, and the Greek and Latin languages; while another formed the Gaels or Gadheals and Kimri, the Gadhealic and the Brizonec being the principal dialects. Then we have their offshoots--as Belgæ, Kimbro-Belgæ, Finnic-Belgæ, etc. So also the Slavic stem, split into Serb, Wendish, etc.]

VII.

ASSYRIANS AND BABYLONIANS.

AUTHORITIES:

_Rawlinson, Duncker, Oppert, M. von Niebuhr, etc._

The mighty empire of the Assyrians, which constitutes one of the first links in the chain of positive history, has hitherto been best known by the great catastrophes which finally closed its existence. The Hebrew Scriptures testify to the wealth, the luxury, and the military power of the Assyrians; but neither these nor the fragments in other ancient historical writers, dispel the obscurity enveloping the interior organism of that great antique people. Neither do the outlines of Babylonian history given by Herodotus afford much insight into the details of her social structure.

In that fore-world which history has not yet penetrated, the region between the Mediterranean sea and the head-waters and affluents of the Euphrates and the Tigris, formed the theatre of a tumultuous confusion of races, nations and civilizations, which has no parallel in the known history of mankind. Social and ethnic structures of the most heterogeneous kind covered those regions, with their various creeds, theocracies, municipalities monarchies and despotisms of every degree.

When, about fifteen centuries B.C., history unveils the empire of the Assyrians or Ninevites, their dominion extended in a direct line from the head-waters of the Euphrates and Tigris to the mouths of those rivers; on the north-east, also, they ruled over Media (thus touching the Caspian), and from thence their dominion stretched across Armenia, southern Caucasus and Georgia, westward to the mouth of the river Halys (the modern Kizil-Ermak), in the Black Sea, and embraced also Palestine, Phoenicia and Kilikia. As the dynasty of Ninus once ruled over Lydia, it is probable that the Ninevite empire at one time extended over at least a part of Asia Minor, as far as the Egean Sea.

This great Assyrian empire rose on the ruins of Babylon, which was once her master, and which was also far superior to her in antiquity.

History has preserved the names of some of the races and tribes which may here at one time have dwelt side by side, but which were subsequently conquered and ruled by the more powerful nation. History, we say, has preserved some, and comparative philology is constantly disentangling others from the chaos of antique Mesopotamian ethnology.[10]

The Assyrian and Babylonian empires stand recorded in the history of humanity as having been the cradles of Eastern despotism and political slavery. How this terrible tyranny arose in Assyria there are no means of ascertaining. Doubtless there were a number of conspiring causes, just as many rills unite to form a powerful stream. In the history of Rome, fortunately we shall be able clearly to seize the genesis of her despotism, and exhibit the germ as well as the wreck of her social structure. Reasoning from all historic analogy, however, it may safely be asserted that Assyrian despotism was generated by war, while political bondage nursed and fostered domestic chattelhood. Evil ever reproducing its own substance and shadow!

The social and domestic economy of the Assyrians must, in its general features, have been similar to that of the Nabatheans and Hebrews. In the course of time, domestic slavery may, to some extent, have been developed in both empires; but even in the last stages of their independent existence, it could not have reached that terrible point it attained after the loss of their autonomy. Assyria and Babylon fell by the blows of nations who were themselves subdued and politically enslaved. To the last, however, neither their lands nor cities were ever devastated or desolated. Their civilization remained in a flourishing condition to the last, and historically it stands as _original_. But original civilizations are never germinated under the influence of domestic chattelhood. The plains of the Euphrates must have been the hive of a rural population whence the imperial armies were supplied, and these supplies could not have been in the form of chattels. In ancient cities, manufactures and industry were often carried on by slaves; but when domestic slavery established itself in the rural regions, the national forces soon became palsied.

The tribes and countries conquered by Assyria and Babylon were simply made tributary to their wealth and power. Prisoners of war were, in all likelihood, disposed of in the same manner as they were in Egypt, and as was the custom all over the ancient world, and indeed, for several centuries in Christendom--employed in the public works, in the cutting of those canals whose traces are still visible, or in raising walls, palaces and public edifices, all of which are now covered mountain high with the dust of ages. Thus Sargon (or Sargina), for example, employed prisoners of war in constructing the vast palaces of Khorsabad.

Assyrian and Babylonian history records repeated transportations of whole populations from one part of the empire to another. The condition of such captives on becoming colonists has already been explained in the section upon the "Hebrews." It would seem that the kings of Assyria and Babylon first inaugurated this mode of wholesale transportation, captivity and colonization. Thus Tiglath-Palassar deported the inhabitants of Damascus to Kur in Georgia; and Assardan sent off, _en masse_, Babylonians, Arkeans, Susianians, Elamites, Persians and Daheans (Tartars), some north and others south. All such transplantments begot destruction, desolation and the breaking up of homesteads; and thus fostered domestic slavery, facilitated its expansion, and increased its fatal influence over both the conquered and the conquerors. And finally, they prepared the soil for that poisonously luxuriant growth of slavery by which Mesopotamians and Syrians became the general bondmen of classical antiquity.

After the destruction of the Assyrian capital (Nineveh) by the revolted nations, Babylon became the centre of a new empire. The rule of Nabukudrussur (a Chaldean from Babylon), extended from the mountains of Armenia to the Arabian shores of the Red Sea, and to the Persian Gulf. This again is a record of perpetual war, and was, in all respects, a continuation of the Ninevitian period of desolation and captivity. Prisoners of war again filled the capital, and worked at the walls and palaces of Babylon. The rich valleys were no longer cultivated by free laborers, but were in the hands of large slaveholders, and tilled by their gangs of slaves.

Babylon fell, destroyed by war, combined with political and domestic slaveries, and she transmitted both diseases to her destroyers.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 10: The philological analysis of the arrow-headed characters and inscriptions discovered in the ruins of Nineveh (Khorsabad) and of Babylon, and on various other spots of the ancient Persian empire, give us some idea of the various ethnic elements which composed the Assyrian and Babylonian empires. Probability, founded on comparative philology, attributes the invention of the arrow-headed characters to a Tartar (Scythic) people or race. Transmitted, in all likelihood, from people to people; increased, fused in usage and application by various languages and dialects, these cuneiform characters--as used for Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian inscriptions--are now ethnically and philologically classified into two main divisions--the Anaryan and the Aryan. The Aryan comprises the Old Persian; the Anaryan of the Ninevite relics is the result of thirteen ethnic and philologic combinations, and was used by the five following peoples, all known to history. 1. Medo-Scythians; 2. Casdo-Scythians; 3. Susians; 4. Ancient Armenians; 5. Assyrians. The following are the thirteen combinations: 1. Pure hieroglyphs; 2. Hieratic signs--neither yet arrow-headed; 3. Old Scythic or Tartar arrow-heads; 4. New Tartar (new under Assyria); 5. Old Susian; 6. New Susian; 7. Old Armenian; 8. New Armenian; 9. Old Assyrian; 10. New Assyrian; 11. Old Babylonian; 12. New Babylonian; 13. Demotic Babylonian.--_Oppert._]

VIII.

MEDES AND PERSIANS.

AUTHORITIES:

_Zend Avesta, Vendidad, Herodotus, Lassen, Pictet, Duncker, etc._

The Medes and Persians, or Zend-speaking Iranians, those destroyers of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, were a mighty branch of the great family of Aryas. The Iranians left the common home of the Aryas at a period so distant as to render useless every effort toward giving it possible or even probable chronology. They settled in regions called by them "Lands of Iran," which, up to the present day, constitute Persia. Some investigators assert that Iran-Persia was previously occupied by Tartars; but the earliest traditions preserved in the Zend, or ancient speech of Zarathustra, do not mention any struggles for supremacy between the races as having taken place.

The Zend Avesta, the oldest traditional record of the people of Iran, presents a picture of the primitive migrations and the social condition of the Iranians. It exhibits them as divided into three classes--priests, soldiers and farmers; though, as yet, there was no such thing as the circumscription of caste. It would seem that the fusion with the Tartars--the supposed aborigines of Iran--was complete, as the Zend Avesta makes no mention of any subjugated people or lower class. The warriors and the agriculturists stood on a perfect social equality. The book of tradition nowhere mentions serfdom, slavery, or property in man. This would seem to authorize the conclusion that among the early Iranians, property in man was unknown. Certainly, at all events, if even the forms of slavery were present, they were in such abeyance as to escape the attention of Zarathustra (Zoroaster), the great moralist and lawgiver of his people, who lived long after the epoch of the early wanderings, and when the Iranic nation formed a well-organized society on Iran's soil. Zarathustra considers agriculture as morally and socially the noblest human occupation; but he speaks of the generous labor of freemen, not the forced drudgery of slaves.

The Vendidad contains frequent allusions to the general occupations of life, and is especially minute regarding the details of husbandry--its wants, modes, products and implements. The farmer is to have at least a team of draught cattle, a harness and a whip; a plough, a hand-mill, and so forth; but there is no mention whatever of a slave as an agricultural requisite. The homestead of an Iranian consists of a habitation, a storehouse, a cellar, stables for horses, camels and cattle; but the records have no allusion to a cabin for the slaves. The Vendidad also describes how dogs--almost sacred to the Iranians--are to be posted to watch over the village and the herds; but nowhere says that they were to be used for watching and hunting slaves. Various operatives and artisans are enumerated, but none of them as bond-servants or as working under compulsion.

The farmers, peasants and operatives of Media and Persia--so admired even by Xenophon and Plato--thus built up a vigorous state and society. After long centuries of existence, however, its strength was undermined by foreign conquests, by luxury, and by political and domestic slavery. A similar phenomenon will present itself again and again in the course of this investigation. When the Medes overthrew the Assyrian empire, they became infected with the dissolute customs of their former masters. The houses of the wealthier were filled with domestic slaves; though, as yet, slavery did not come in contact with agriculture or the industrial pursuits, and so spread like a blight over the land.

Domestic slavery, in the limited sense of household servitude, was doubtless ultimately introduced into Persia; but never was Persian held as _chattel_ on his ancestral soil. Nor yet did despotism, or political slavery, exist in the governmental structure of the Iranians, who, led by Kyros (Cyrus), conquered the whole western Asiatic world. Kyros was only the first among his peers, and was all-powerful only as a leader and commander. He had not yet the despotic power of Xerxes and other and later scions of the Achæmenides; and to the last, even to the conquests by Alexander, the Iranic social structure was comparatively free from domestic slavery. Nor were the Persians and other Iranian tribes ever the absolute political slaves of their own kings.