XVIII.

The blacks have been too degraded to more than conceive of liberty, too debased to think of resistance to the forces that crushed them, and they have neither observed, nor sought for opportunities, to throw off their chains and sweep over the lands, like a destroying element, with the accumulated wrongs of centuries. Yet there were black men among them who were capable of high cultivation. The long contact with the superior white race had recast the faculties of their mind, and had altered perceptibly the rugged contour of their forms and features.

The writer observed with wonder in the regiment of black men which formed part of the column of the desperate assault upon Fort Wagner, beautiful heads, whose classic and regular outlines recalled the finest of the antique.

We believe with the writer in the "Revue des Deux Mondes," that contact with the white races has given the negro the lines of the Caucasian form, and that the Congo type can disappear or become greatly modified.

These changes in the typical form, which we have since observed elsewhere, appear to have taken place sometimes without the admixture of the blood of the whites.

That the black men in the United States army fought well, no one will deny; that they conducted themselves admirably in the murderous assaults at Fort Wagner, or under the destroying fire at Olustee, and in many other conflicts, every one possessed of any candor will admit. When we consider the degradation whence they suddenly rose, and the steadiness and firmness, and the manly bearing they exhibited after the few lessons of military training, we are compelled to render thanks to them for their efforts in the struggle for national existence, and to admit the probability of their attaining that degree of intelligence, wisdom, and virtue which distinguish the true citizen. That these men will attain the standard of intellect of the Caucasian, we neither expect nor believe; but we do maintain, that in the nature of every race, however debased by prejudice, and the avarice of superior society, there exists the element of honesty, virtue, truth, and a horror of wrong, which may be developed and turned to the good of all society, in repelling and resisting the force of machination, the intrigue which arises from disappointed ambition, or the insatiable lust of more favored and less considerate classes.

No one acquainted with the history of the commerce of human beings will wonder at the present condition of the blacks, or that they have not risen in the scale of social and intellectual advancement. For, looking back to the primitive ages we may see how the human species have been depressed in servitude, and how the very same families, who carried the arts and sciences to celestial limits, were affected by this influence. Persons of the same blood and inheritance as the best families of Greece and Rome, were often reduced to slavery, and they sank rapidly under its debasing effects. They were tamed like the black man of the South; "like brutes, by the stings of hunger and the lash; and their education was so conducted as to render them commodious instruments of labor for their possessors. This degradation of course depressed their minds, restricted the expansion of their faculties, stifled almost every effort of genius, and exhibited them to the world as beings endued with inferior capacities to the rest of mankind. But for this opinion there appears to have been no foundation in truth or justice. Equal to their fellow-men in natural talents, and alike capable of improvement, any apparent or real difference between them and some others must have been owing to the mode of education, to the rank they were doomed to occupy, and to the treatment they were appointed to endure."

After all, the world appears to be a vast arena, where the good and the bad are gathered together, and men are left to their own efforts, whether to rise up in that scale of intelligence and virtue which conducts to immortality, or to grovel deeper into the depths of degradation, where there is nothing but death and annihilation. The vault of heaven grows in immensity as we gaze into its limitless expanse, whilst the shadows and attractions of earth fade away from view, or allure only those who have forsaken nature.