should subserve
civilization. I assert that barbarism is _wrong_, and civilization is
RIGHT; that the former conduces to the misery and the latter to the
happiness of mankind. Barbarism--with its pagan idolatries, its
monstrous superstitions, its devil-worship, its false religious rites,
its heathen orgies, its cruelties, its cannibalism--is wrong. Who will
deny this? Who are its apologists and advocates? Let them stand forth
and show the right of barbarism! Let us have a homily on its beauties!
let them picture to us the meliorations of cannibalism! Will any one
do it? No; it is a self-evident wrong. To attempt, even, to prove it
wrong, would seem to be a work of supererogation. Barbarism it
repugnant to the common sense of the Anglo-Saxon race; a violation of
the conscience of civilization. Cannibalism is an almost inconceivable
outrage against all right, in moral, social, or even superior animal
existence. Few animals or even reptiles devour their kind. It is,
therefore, an act repugnant to human nature, and in violation of the
amenities even of a nobler animal existence. In a word, it is
unmitigated wrong, showing its subjects and votaries to be incarnate
devils.

BARBARISM OF THE AFRICAN RACE.

The African race is a race of barbarians, and civilization to that
race would be an artificial state of existence.[3] The vestiges of
barbarism characterize the African, in his normal state. The latent
principle of cannibalism, lurks, in dormant energy, within the very
core of his being, and constitutes a prominent characteristic of his
animal existence. The economy and order of nature is no less marked in
the _carnivorous_ than in the herbivorous mammalia and quadrumana; and
although their physical distinctions are not always so marked as to
render apparent, to superficial observation, the uses and functions of
their entire organism, yet science has been a tolerably faithful
interpreter of cause and effect, and has not failed to recognize those
organic qualities, and the structural adaptability of the African
race, which qualify it for its mission as the representative of
barbaric fury and degradation, and the type, in human form, of that
chaotic element of self-annihilation, which nature has kindly
restricted to the fewest number of the lowest orders of animated
being.[4] The inhabitants of Southern and Central Africa, from whence
our slaves are drawn, the Feejeean, the Caffrarian, the New-Zealander,
and the Hottentot