Yankee civilization.
It has been a constant boast of the North that it was a land of churches, schools and newspapers. New England has 4,042 churches; the Middle States, 9,714; the Northwestern States, 10,926. Maine has a larger proportion of schools than any other country in the world. In New England only one person over twenty years of age in every four hundred natives is unable to read and write. The Federal Government has granted over forty millions of acres of land for school purposes, and over four millions of acres for university purposes. Two thousand five hundred and twenty-six newspapers were published in the United States, by far the greater proportion in the North.If church buildings could make a people religious, if the means of education and the opportunities of knowledge could render them virtuous, the people of the United States ought to be the best people in the world. Or, if civilization consists in material development, they ought to be the most civilized of mankind. If civilization consists in steam, machinery, ships, electricity, and gas, the United States should be the most civilized of nations. Instead of all this, their conduct in the present invasion has proved them the most vicious and the most barbarous of nations.
We do not pretend that this is the result of their civilization, but it is proof that their ideas of civilization are false, and that, in the true sense of that term, they have never been civilized. Churches, in many of which the principal doctrines of Christianity are denied, and pulpits in which malice, hatred, and all uncharitableness are preached, can scarcely be received as indications of a popular acceptance of Christianity. In point of fact, infidelity pervades one portion of the Northern population, and fanaticism another, leaving but a helpless minority who have not bowed the knee to Baal. The impotency of education, unassisted by higher influences, to improve the natural character, is shown by the complete failure of newspapers, schools and colleges, to elevate the Yankee population above the animal passions of brutes. The naked savage of the wilderness, who has never seen the impression of a type on paper, nor heard of such a thing as a school or a university could not be more brutal in his instincts, nor more ferocious in his hatred, than the amalgamating and house and city burning population of the Northern States.
If that population is a fair representation of the so-called civilization of the world, then the limits between that condition and barbarism are narrow indeed. The difference between the two is an external habit of life and dress, and in the acquisition of knowledge rather than any moral dissimilarity. The Yankee is but the barbarian dressed in broadcloth, knowing all about steam and machinery, and conforming externally to the usages of civilized society, but still at heart a savage, who will prove himself true to his original instincts whenever an opportunity is afforded him like the present war to disclose his true nature. Educate, Unitarianism, and Unionize this savage as you will the leopard cannot change his spots, nor the Ethiopian his skin, nor the Puritan hand refrain, when not prevented by the sheer force of law and bayonets, from plundering and burning houses, destroying mills and harvests, outraging and murdering helpless noncombatants, and deliberately devoting a whole city to bloodshed and flames.
But let us not do injustice to those savages of North America who were the illustrious predecessors of the Yanks. If they were fierce in battle and unforgiving in revenge, if they destroyed private property and made war upon helpless womanhood and infancy, it must be remembered that they never set themselves up as models of honest and religious deportment, had never heard the name of Christianity except as the religion of their white enemies, and never knew the advantages of universal education. With all their sins they had some redeeming virtues. If they were vindictive in their animosities they were faithful in their friendships. If they were furious in battle, they were as brave as they were bloody, and could endure with unshrinking fortitude in their own persons the tortures they inflicted upon others. There could be no greater contrast in the world than the whining and abject Yankee in his hour of discomfiture and disaster, and the North American Indian singing his death chant amid the flames of the stake. Moreover the souls of the Aborigines were not absorbed in the pursuit of dollars and cents. Whatever other idols they had they did not worship the golden calf. They had nobler passions than the pursuit of material pelf. The Yankees, whose only idea of civilization is the application of mechanical discoveries to the aggrandizement of individual gain, it inferior in everything that constitutes a man to the North-American Indian.
Perhaps it was some lurking suspicion of this fact that made the Yankee as intolerant and unforgiving to the red-skinned savage as he has been maudlin and besotted in his sympathies for the negro barbarian. In this cable object of his tender mercies he finds the consolation of a supposed inferiority to himself. The proud defiance of the red man's eye, the impossibility of ever becoming a slave, the heroic contempt of danger and death, do not relieve the gross qualities of the African savage. Here at last is one of barbarians on whom the Yankee may look down with assured self-complacency. But even this is not a demonstrated fact. Some Yankee philosophers have announced of late that the African is a higher type of man than Yankees, and ought to be used for enriching their blood. This, however, is a recent discovery, and will only be applied to its designed animal purposes, thereby proving the civilization of Yankeedom the grossest and most indecent of all barbarimss. After their short and frantic saturnalia of besotted inst, which has no lower deep, except promiscuous intercourse with gorillas, the savage of Africa will find himself the most helpless and hopeless of all salvages — slaves of barbarians whose only difference from themselves is the superior whiteness of their skins and the blacker hue of their
