to delay justice, to
the mind of Jefferson; but so they did to the mind of Lincoln. But that
the slave was human and the servitude inhuman--that was, if anything,
clearer to Jefferson than to Lincoln. The fact is that the utter
separation and subordination of the black like a beast was a _progress_;
it was a growth of nineteenth-century enlightenment and experiment; a
triumph of science over superstition. It was 'the way the world was
going,' as Matthew Arnold reverentially remarked in some connection;
perhaps as part of a definition of God. Anyhow, it was not Jefferson's
definition of God. He fancied, in his far-off patriarchal way, a Father
who had made all men brothers; and brutally unbrotherly as was the
practice, such democratical Deists never dreamed of denying the theory.
It was not until the scientific sophistries began that brotherhood was
really disputed. Gobineau, who began most of the modern talk about the
superiority and inferiority of racial stocks, was seized upon eagerly by
the less generous of the slave-owners and trumpeted as a new truth of
science and a new defence of slavery. It was not really until the dawn
of Darwinism, when all our social relations began to smell of the
monkey-house, that men thought of the barbarian as only a first and the
baboon as a second cousin. The full servile philosophy has been a modern
and even a recent thing; made in an age whose invisible deity was the
Missing Link. The Missing Link was a true metaphor in more ways than
one; and most of all in its suggestion of a chain.

By a symbolic coincidence, indeed, slavery grew more brazen and brutal
under the encouragement of more than one movement of the progressive
sort. Its youth was renewed for it by the industrial prosperity of
Lancashire; and under that influence it became a commercial and
competitive instead of a patriarchal and customary thing. We may say
with no exaggerative irony that the unconscious patrons of slavery were
Huxley and Cobden. The machines of Manchester were manufacturing a great
many more things than the manufacturers knew or wanted to know; but they
were certainly manufacturing the fetters of the slave, doubtless out of
the best quality of steel and iron. But this is a minor illustration of
the modern tendency, as compared with the main stream of scepticism
which was destroying democracy. Evolution became more and more a vision
of the break-up of our brotherhood, till by the end of the nineteenth
cen