THREE CENTURIES' PERSPECTIVES 4* 3
In the next line, Darwin moves from description to refutation
and a plea for action:
I will not even allude to the many heart-sickening atrocities which I authen-
tically heard of;—nor would I have mentioned the above revolting details,
had I not met with several people so blinded by the constitutional gaiety of
the negro as to speak of slavery as a tolerable evil.
Refuting the standard argument for benevolent treatment with a
telling analogy from his own land, Darwin continues:
It is argued that self-interest will prevent excessive cruelty; as if self-interest
protected our domestic animals, which are far less likely than degraded
slaves to stir up the rage of their savage masters.
Though I have read them a hundred times, I still cannot encoun-
ter Darwin's closing lines without experiencing a spinal shiver for
the power of his prose—and without feeling great pride in having
an intellectual hero with such admirable human qualities as well (the
two don't mesh very often):
Those who look tenderly at the slave owner and with a cold heart at the
slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter; what a
cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! Picture to yourself the
chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children—those
objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own—-being torn from
you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and
palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbors as themselves, who
believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one's blood
boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American
descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.
Thus, if we must convene a court more than 150 years after the
event—a rather foolish notion in any case, though we seem driven
to such anachronism—I think that Darwin will pass through the
pearly gates, with perhaps a short stay in purgatory to think about
paternalism. What then is the antidote to paternalism and its mod-
ern versions of insufficient appreciation for human differences
(combined with too easy an equation of one's own particular and
largely accidental way with universal righteousness)? What else but
the direct and sympathetic study of cultural diversity—the world's
most fascinating subject in any case, whatever its virtues in moral
education. This is the genuine theme behind our valuable modern