Du penchant à la servitude et de quelques autres vices attribués aux peuples d’espèces colorées. — D

CHAP. 49: > Of the penchant for servitude and of some other vices attributed to the peoples of colored species. — Of the superiority attributed in this regard to the peoples of the Caucasian species. — Continuation of the preceding chapter.

The reasonings that are made when one compares the peoples of one species to those of another no longer prove anything when it is a matter of comparing among themselves peoples of the same species. Here, the proportions are exactly the same between the men who command and those who serve as when one compares among themselves men who all belong to the Caucasian species. If, then, it is in the nature of the latter to be free, one does not see why it would not be in the nature of the former to be so equally, whenever they were not enslaved by men of another species. One can well claim that Negroes are the slaves of whites for the reason that the former are of a nature inferior to the latter; but by what chain of ideas can one arrive from the supposed superiority of whites to the enslavement of peoples of the Mongol species by peoples of the same species, or to the enslavement of blacks by other blacks? Supposing the superiority of whites over the other species to be as extensive as one wishes, one will never arrive at drawing from this fact the consequence that the peoples of the Mongol species, for example, are made to be the slaves of one another. Men, of whatever species they may be, are assuredly superior to the animals they have enslaved; does it follow that, if sheep were left to themselves, they would immediately divide into two classes, one of masters and the other of slaves?

If it had been in the nature of the Mongols, the Americans, the Ethiopians, the Malays, to be slaves, they would have remained free until peoples of another species came to enslave them; for which among them would have wanted to resist their natural penchant and devote themselves to being masters? If it had been in the nature of the Mongols to be slaves, would not those of central Asia have invaded China to put themselves by force at the service of the Chinese, and to compel them, arms in hand, to consume in idleness the fruits of their labors? It is said that slavery is the result of ignorance and vice, and that, by their own nature, the peoples foreign to the Caucasian race, not being susceptible of acquiring our intelligence and our morals, are not susceptible of reaching the same degree of liberty; but here one only postpones the difficulty; if such a kind of vice and such a degree of ignorance are proper to a species, all the individuals of which it is composed must equally be afflicted by them, and the effects must be the same on all; all, consequently, must tend with equal force to be slaves, and then they will remain free for lack of masters; or else they must all tend with equal force to be masters, and then they will remain free for lack of slaves.

The penchant for servitude or domination is not the only vice that is believed to be inherent in the nature of the colored species: polygamy is also a trait by which they are characterized. It is true that we have found this custom established among the most barbarous of the Mongol, Malay, American, and Ethiopian species; but this custom exists, in general, only for the chiefs of the nations where it is admitted, and not all nations admit it. Thus, polygamy is practiced neither in Japan, nor in China, nor even in Persia, except by the emperor and by a small number of grandees. The natives of Peru, those of Mexico, and some other peoples of the same species, likewise left the use of a plurality of women to their chiefs.

But have the peoples of the Caucasian species shown themselves superior in this respect to other peoples? I leave it to those who have read the history of the Jews to decide whether their kings and their patriarchs showed more delicacy and restraint in their passions than the chiefs of the American or Mongol tribes; I will content myself with citing facts that are less distant from us. It is evident, for those who know the history of the peoples of Europe, that polygamy was formerly practiced by the chiefs of the Germanic and Gallic tribes; it is an incontestable fact that European kings formerly married several women [530]. The Romans did not admit that one could marry several; but among them marriage did not exclude concubinage. Concubinage was a legal status, and the number of slave women a man could possess was unlimited. The Russians long admitted the plurality of women, and it was only very late that they seemed to renounce it; I say that they seemed to renounce it, for the plurality of women exists in fact wherever domestic slavery is established. In our own day, the Turks, the Arabs, and all the peoples of the northern coasts of Africa admit polygamy, and these peoples, without a doubt, belong neither to the Ethiopian species, nor to the copper-colored species. Finally, among the Persians, the plurality of women is admitted; but this custom is foreign to the mass of the population, which is of the Mongol species, whereas it is much practiced by the grandees, who, almost all, belong through a long series of alliances to the Caucasian species. Of all the species of peoples, there is perhaps none that has abused and still abuses the plurality of women more than our own; just as there is perhaps none that has made less use of it than the peoples of the Ethiopian race [531].Infanticide, which is also considered a characteristic proper to the morals of the colored species, has never been part of the general morals of any species. At a certain epoch, all peoples without distinction were abandoned to the natural penchant that inclines all beings to the preservation of their species. Chiefs did not believe it was any more necessary to make it a duty for parents to feed and raise their children than to make it a duty for them to feed and preserve themselves; they no more thought of repressing infanticide than of repressing suicide. Indeed, very extraordinary events must have occurred and much time must have passed before it entered the minds of governments that they could, for the preservation of children, institute magistrates more attentive, more vigilant, and more tender than fathers and mothers. When the Roman legislators recognized an absolute power for fathers over their children, it was not a new fact they introduced; it was a fact as old as the human race, whose existence they recognized and confirmed. I say that this fact was as old as the human race because it is in the very nature of things that the weak being, who has no means of self-preservation or defense, should be under the power of the strong being who gives it life, and who can either preserve it or let it perish. The power to dispose of one’s children in an absolute manner, and consequently to put them to death or to expose them, was therefore not particular to the Romans; it existed among the peoples of all species, and particularly among all the peoples of Europe. It is even evident that this power could not be modified as long as offenses were only private wrongs, and the punishment for murder was limited to paying an indemnity to the relatives of the deceased [532].

It is remarkable that the limits placed in Europe on the power of parents over their children date from roughly the same epoch as the establishment of despotism. It was when the license that domestic slavery entails had made marriage an unbearable burden, or when the civil wars and the despotism of the emperors had broken the bonds of family, that it became necessary to make laws to compel men to preserve or reproduce themselves.

The attractions of marriage no longer having enough force to produce the preservation of families, they supplemented them with the fear of fines, and they replaced paternal love with the fear of tortures. They punished fathers who would not preserve their children, following the same principle that would lead a master to chastise those of his slaves who, out of feelings of pity, would cause his own to perish. They considered death a refuge against tyranny, and infanticide, like suicide later, was punished as an infringement on imperial property. Thus, far from considering the acts of governments, which aim to compel parents by the fear of legal penalties to take care of and raise their children, as proof of the superiority of our morals, one should consider them as proofs of a profound immorality, if they were not a proof of the evils produced by an unbridled tyranny [533].

But these laws of which we boast have not always existed among the peoples of our species, and there are still several among whom they are unknown. Magistrates generally interfere very little in what happens in family matters among the nations that have adopted the Muslim religion. The Arabs, the Turks, the Moors, and several others have, if I am not mistaken, placed no restriction on paternal power. The grandees of Persia and Turkey populate their harems only with women of the Caucasian species who are sold to them by their parents; not long ago, the beys of Egypt recruited their Mamluks from men of the same species, who were likewise sold to them by their parents. The hordes that populate the Caucasus mountains engage in a trade of men, women, and children as active as that which takes place on the coasts of Africa. How, then, have the men of this species shown themselves superior to others in this regard?

The Chinese do not repress the exposure of children; but do the Europeans, with their penal laws and their moral maxims, repress it much better? Is it not, on the contrary, proven beyond a doubt that the peoples of Europe who call themselves the most civilized and the most moral cause almost as many children to perish through exposure as the Chinese? In what sense is it therefore true to say that, by their nature, the peoples of the Caucasian species are more moral than the others? What are the vices from which they can claim to be exempt? What are the virtues that are particular to them [534]?

Macartney, comparing the morals of the working classes of China to the morals of the same classes among the most civilized nations of Europe, found that the former were far superior to the latter; and, doubtless, he would have found the difference much greater if he had included in the comparison that whole part of the population that is still attached to the glebe. Chardin also compared the mass of the population of Persia to the mass of the population of the European states that were then the most civilized, and he arrived at a similar result. It is true that the same traveler reports appalling cruelties committed by the kings, or by the men of the court; but these men are precisely those who, by continually allying themselves with women of the Caucasian species, have lost all the traits that characterize the Mongol species. Thumberg made observations in Japan analogous to those Chardin had made in Persia; he saw the Japanese indignant at the brutal manner in which the Dutch treated their servants; a Russian traveler attempted to have some presents accepted by officers of that country, and he could not succeed. La Pérouse, in the Philippines, had occasion to compare its inhabitants to the peoples of Europe, and he found them neither less intelligent, nor less industrious, nor less moral. Despite the vexations of the Spanish government to which they are subject, the peasants have an air of happiness that one does not encounter in our European villages; their houses are of an admirable cleanliness [535]. And these are not small peoples of the Mongol species that I am comparing to great nations of the European species: for China alone equals, by its population, all the nations that belong to this latter species.

In countries where one finds men of diverse species mixed together and equally free, the superiority of morals rarely belongs to the Caucasian species. In the islands of Asia subject to the Dutch, one finds among the European colonists a multitude of Chinese: vices of all kinds are the apanage of the former; while the latter, belonging to the Mongol species, possess, on the contrary, all the social virtues. At the Cape of Good Hope, the Dutch colonists are, by their morals, far inferior to the Hottentots who live among them, as I will show elsewhere when speaking of slavery. On the island of Saint Helena, one finds, among the English colonists, a multitude of free negroes whose ancestors were formerly brought to the country as slaves, and these negroes are the most laborious and most moral men on the island; the white colonists, in their pride, wanted to have them banished from the country; but, after a mature examination, it was found that, for several years, not a single one had ever been accused of a crime, not a single one who, of an age to work, was a burden to his parish [536]. An analogous phenomenon was observed in the state of Massachusetts when the blacks there were emancipated: one saw no increase at the time of their emancipation, either in the number of murders or in the number of thefts [537]. In Carolina, the number of whites who are brought to justice as guilty of offenses or crimes always far exceeds the number of blacks who are put on trial, in proportion to their respective numbers in the two classes of the population [538]. In Philadelphia, it was at first believed, upon visiting the prisons, that the black population furnished a more considerable number of convicts than the white population; but a thorough examination led to the abandonment of this opinion [539]. Black servants are often preferred to whites, because they work just as well, and they have no less trustworthiness [540].

Blacks sometimes preserve, even in slavery, moral qualities that seem incompatible with such a state. In Louisiana, they have for one another a touching affection. One never sees them part without giving each other marks of interest or friendship, or meet without asking for news of their relatives, their friends, their acquaintances: they render each other all the good offices that are in their power. They are all of a perfect discretion, especially with regard to whites; if one of them is caught in a fault, it is rare that he denounces his accomplices: the most severe punishments can rarely extract the admission from him. When they belong to good masters who let them accumulate a peculium, one sees children who remain slaves and who use their small savings to buy the freedom of their old parents. At the time of the insurrection of Saint-Domingue, there were slaves who, out of pity for their masters, renounced the liberty they could acquire, and accompanied them in their flight to the United States. The masters rewarded them by selling them to the first slave traders who presented themselves [541].