the Greeks; and of the infidel Hobbes, that every man, being
by nature at war with every other man, has a perpetual right to reduce
him to servitude if he has the power. It is the cardinal doctrine of
what John Quincy Adams has very properly styled the Satanic school of
philosophy,--the ethics of an old Norse sea robber or an Arab plunderer
of caravans. It is as widely removed from the sweet humanities and
unselfish benevolence of Christianity as the faith and practice of the
East India Thug or the New Zealand cannibal.

Our author does not, however, take us altogether by surprise. He has
before given no uncertain intimations of the point towards which his
philosophy was tending. In his brilliant essay upon 'Francia of
Paraguay', for instance, we find him entering with manifest satisfaction
and admiration into the details of his hero's tyranny. In his 'Letters
and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell'--in half a dozen pages of savage and
almost diabolical sarcasm directed against the growing humanity of the
age, the "rose-pink sentimentalisms," and squeamishness which shudders at
the sight of blood and infliction of pain--he prepares the way for a
justification of the massacre of Drogheda. More recently he has
intimated that the extermination of the Celtic race is the best way of
settling the Irish question; and that the enslavement and forcible
transportation of her poor, to labor under armed taskmasters in the
colonies, is the only rightful and proper remedy for the political and
social evils of England. 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 wou