hts
of society, and the rights of the particular society or nation are
limited by international law, or the rights of universal society--the
truth the ex-governor of Hungary overlooked. The grand error of
Gentilism was in denying the unity and therefore the solidarity of the
race, involved in its denial or misconception of the unity of God. It
therefore was never able to assign any solid basis to international
law, and gave it only a conventional or customary authority, thus
leaving the jus gentium, which it recognized in deed, without any real
foundation in the constitution of things, or authority in the real
world. Its real basis is in the solidarity of the race, which has its
basis in the unity of God, not the dead or abstract unity asserted by
the old Eleatics, the Neo-Platonists, or the modern Unitarians, but the
living unity consisting in the threefold relation in the Divine
Essence, of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, as asserted by Christian
revelation, and believed, more or less intelligently, by all
Christendom.

The tendency in the Southern States has been to overlook the social
basis of the state, or the rights of society founded on the solidarity
of the race, and to make all rights and powers personal, or individual;
and as only the white race has been able to assert and maintain its
personal freedom, only men of that race are held to have the right to
be free. Hence the people of those States felt no scruple in holding
the black or colored race as slaves. Liberty, said they, is the right
only of those who have the ability to assert and maintain it. Let the
negro prove that he has this ability by asserting and maintaining his
freedom, and he will prove his right to be free, and that it is a gross
outrage, a manifest injustice, to enslave him; but, till then, let him
be my servant, which is best for him and for me. Why ask me to free
him? I shall by doing so only change the form of his servitude. Why
appeal to me! Am I my brother's keeper? Nay, is he my brother? Is
this negro, more like an ape or a baboon than a human being, of the
same race with myself? I believe it not. But in some instances, at
least, my dear slaveholder, your slave is literally your brother, and
sometimes even your son, born of your own daughter. The tendency of
the Southern democrat was to deny the unity of the race, as well as all
obligations of society to protect the weak and helpless, and therefore
all true civil society.