A MAN AND A " SUBGEN."
AMAN as modest as he is enthusiastic has arisen in New York to proclaim a great scientific truth in the light of which, as he repeatedly tells us, the millenium will approach apace ; and when it does the only pang will be that the great benefactor who has spread it among men should have concealei himself beneath the veil of the anonymous, and go down to the grave "unwept, un- honoured, and unsung." The discovery is partly verbal and partly real. The verbal part of it is that slavery, derived from the oppression of the Sclaves by men of the same Caucasian branch of the human family, is a misnomer for the subjection of a subordinate to a superior species, and that this relation should accordingly be called in future" subgenation," which is to mean the subjection of a subordinate species of the human race to a higher species unfit for intermarriage with it without degeneration and mongrelism. The verbal blunder the writer therefore corrects thus :— "NEW WORDS USED is rms Boos.
" Subgenation—from the Latin Sub, lower, and Generatus and Genus, a race born or created lower than another; hence, the natural or normal relation of an inferior race.
" Subgen—is used to describe the persons of the inferior races thus placed in their natural positions. Plural form, Subgens."
In future therefore, the Mongol, says the author, may be usefully called a subgen in relation to a Caucasian, a Malay to a Mongol, an American Indian to a Malay, an Esquimaux to an American Indian, and a Negro to an Esquimaux. A fortiori of course the negro is subgen to any race higher in the hierarchy of mankind, and most of all to a Caucasian. So much for the verbal reformation, to which the author attaches great importance as removing the false ideas which the prejudices against Sclave subjection have rightly raised. The results of correcting our language he estimates very highly. Directly we express in our language the notion that a species is visibly beneath ours, the idea of cruelty connected with the arbitrary disposal of its destiny will pass away, and all Europe will compete with Anurica, for the privilege of having " subgens " in its service. The Confederate Constitution will b3 universally adopted. For it alone "sets at rest for ever the distracting negro quastion in the -only way that it ever can be permanently settled. Unfortunately it retains the old and vicious nomenclature, calling subgens slaves, and subgenation slavery ; but this can easily be remedied, and arose not from any mistake as to the relation itself, but solely from the want of a proper word to express that relation—a word which the writer trusts he has supplied." No doubt the first step that Mr. Jefferson Davis will take after perusing this important work will be to summon a convention of the Southern States to amend the Constitution by substituting the word subgen for slave, and then the difficulty will be at an end. Only the writer strikes us as a little timid about applying his own theory to other than African subgens. After showing us plainly that the distinction applies to at least four other species, he never ventures to advo- cate the use of any but the African to serve the white man in the great millennial prospects which be holds out to the latter-in the following thrilling words :- " No one can estimate the amount of wealth that native Africans— now as useless as inanimate clods of clay—would produce if sot to work. There is not a man so poor bat could afford to own one subgen In fact poverty would be aboliAied ! Almshouses would be as deserted as the Pyramids of Egypt, and prisons become as carious as the ruins of Palenque. Dr. Franklin estimated that if every white individual per- formed fear hours* labour each day it would be sufficient for the sup- port and maintenance of mankind. But this is altogether too high an estimate. Under the operation of subgenation, the white race would be relieved, first of all the grosser employments, and secondly, very much -of all labour. In the far off future it is doubtless the intention of the Creator to relieve the race created in His own image of all employment, except that which will develop the intellectual, moral, and spiritual natures. The millennium, which many people are groping in the dark to grasp, is a fact of the future ; but the world is not ready for it. It was five thousand years before God revealed to Galileo the motions of the heavenly bodies. It was six thousand years before the idea of the • equality of all white men was revealed to Thomas Jefferson. That idea is not yet firmly ettablished. We, as yet even in this country, only 'see it, as through a glass, darkly,' while Europe does not even acknowledge it at all."
The literary insight of this great anonymous writer is equal to dais political enthusiasm. He quotes the passage of Pope's Messiah beginning, "lilac, crowned with light, Imperial Salem, rise ! " and ending,—
" See, barbarous nations at thy gates attend, Walk in thy light and in thy temple bend ! "
—adding with naïf ardour, "the idea of Subgenation is expressed in the last two lines, and is borrowed from the prophet Isaiah." No doubt the learned author refers to the sixtieth chapter, begin- ning, "Arise, shine !" and supposes that the verse "And the Gentiles shall come to thy light and kings to the brightness of thy rising" is a prophecy of negro slavery in the Confederate States,—the Africans being notoriously the only Gentiles of whom Isaiah could have thought with any propriety, and Richmond, Va., being of course the only conceivable modern antitype of Jerusalem. The writer indeed has himself something of the prophetic order of mind. He passes into a holy rapture in delineating the new earth if not the new heavens which negro subgeuation will bring. "Could every negro now on the face of' the earth,l' he says, "be placed at useful labour the homes of poverty would be lighted up with a smile, joy would gladden the hearthstones where sor- row like a spectre now sits enthroned, and even the morning stars would once more sing 'Joy on earth, peace and good-will among man' "—a passage which shows that in the divine rapture of his holy theme the author identifies the song of the morning stars in Job with that of the heavenly host in the Gospel. So far from objecting to the Bible or feeling any delicacy in quoting as the seer of " subgenation " the same prophet who had enjoined on his nation "to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke," he gets over all the difficulties by simply stating that "historically it [the Bible] deals only with the Caucasian race,"—that apparently being in the author's mind the only race which God created "in His own image," and which- ' with the help of subgens—is entitled to a millennium. But there is a portion of this ecstatic writer's work which is quite as curious as its doctrine of subgenation. It appears from it that subgenation is the true and only root of genuine democracy. All the great Democrats front Jefferson Davis downwards to Vallandigham and Fernando Wood—and of all of them the writer speaks with equal reverence and sympathy—are he says hearty believers in the great gospel of subgenation. "As for Subgenation becoming omnipotent and universal,' he says, "that is just what every democrat and friend of humanity desires,"—unconsciously using "friend of humanity" in the same sense as Canning in the celebrated lines on the needy knife-grinder; except indeed that, if the knife-grinder in question had been a subgen, he would have bad the "friend of humanity" kick without instructing him ; and, if a brother, instruct without kicking him. "The writer," he goes on, "who has had an opportunity during the past winter to become acquainted with the opinions of most of the Democratic members of Congress on this question, was struck with this remarkable fact. Almost to a man they are at heart in favour of Subgenation (slavery). Even Messrs. Brooks and Cox do not differ in this respect materially from Jefferson Davis and Alex- ander. H. Stephens. The country therefore is perishing not so muchfor lack of knowledge as from a want of moral courage ; it is dying from sheer cowardice." And he accounts seriously for the close connection between democracy and subgenation in this wise: —Men who live in the presence of a lower species of their own kind, are taught by constantly contemplating the great gulf between them and the lower species to ignore the infinitely sataller and so to say accidental differences between different varieties of the same species. "The presence of the negro constantly reminded the whites how vain were all the artificial distinctions which men had engrafted upon society." That is, as tigers would learn equality inter se by contemplating the genius and habits of cats, so do white men learn mutual deference and respect by contemplating the genius and habits of negroes. The value far freedom springs from the permanent scorn for a visible servitude, the sense of equality from the permanent scorn for specific inferiority. It is a beautiful and Christian teaching this—that disgust is the great educator, and that we rise, not by loving that which is above, but by spurn- ing that which is beneath us. Freedom, quotes our author from Burke, is most valued by those States in which there are slaves, because there "it is not only an enjoyment but a rank and pri- vilege." And extending this great principle, the writer infers that "a society founded on Subgenation produces the highest type of mankind—the most consummate statesmen and genera,* the highest type of womanhood, and the most exalted morality and virtue." This and many other isolated passages read like the production of a covert satirist on the South ; but it is impossible to read many pages of the work without being com- pletely driven from this the first and most natural hypothesis. Indeed the permanent and absurd antithesis assumed through- out the. book between the gospel of subgenation, and the doetrine that the mixture of the white and black races would be a benefit to American society and man, suffices to show the serious purpose in this marvellous publication. In truth of course it is the servile treatment of the black race which alone promotes amalgamation ; for in free States it is like sympathies, and • like tastes, and like social positions which attract ; in slave States the women are used by their masters without any reference to intellectual or moral ties. Of course our subgenationist is as enthusiastic for the subgen-trade--commonly called slave-trade —as for subgenation itself. "Never," be says of the execution of the captain of a slaver, "never was so foul a murder com- mitted as when the true and noble young man Gordon was hanged in this city in 1861 for participation in the importation of Africans. He was a martyr to ignorance and fanaticism as senseless as that which formerly hanged old women on the charge of witchcraft." "We should at once open the importation of African subgens and defend the Christian and democratic policy in spite of a world of monarchists in arms."
Perhaps it is not quite candid in our enthusiast to call his a " Christian " as well as a democratic policy, since he admits that though Isaiah may have had a distinct glimpse of the millenium of subgenation, the Bible is addressed only to Caucasians; but in this he only adopts] the old practice of divines who always call princi- ples Christian which they think right, entirely without reference to any vestige of such principles in the teaching of the first Christian communities. He would call subgenation probably, as Dr. Newman does the adoration of the Saints, a "preservative addition" to the Christian doctrine of the brotherhood of man, and would no doubt gravely maintain that our Lord's solemn words as to whosoever should do the will of His Father who is in Heaven should really be
qualified by saying, " the same,—sxcept subgens,—is my brother, my sister, and my mother." Taking the book to be earnest, which after repeated consideration of the potat we must believe it to be, —a more extraordinary proof of the corrupting influence of slavery on the Northern Democracy can scarcely be imagined, especially if it be true as the author asserts that all the-Democratic leaders of the North do not simply support slavery in the spirit of compromise, but in the spirit of genuine admiration of its principles and effects. To deduce democracy from slavery,—to make the old formula "Am I not a man and a brother ?" for men of the same species, the natural corollary from the formula "Are you not a man but a subgen ?" towards men of a lower species,—to base freedom upou tyranny and equality, on scorn,—is the doctrine of a system whose only fruit could be to degrade Caucasians not only into subgeus but brutes,—not merely to depress the race but efface the type,—to blot out the image of God first in the higher and com- manding race, next in the lower and subject one.
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