In the summer of 1830 the wave of revolution rolled again over Europe. The rights of man, the brotherhood of man, and the sovereignty of the people, were the principles which pressed again to the front. While no actual connection can be established between the Revolution of 1830 in Europe and the rise of Abolition in the United States, yet they belong to the same period of time, and harmonize in principle. The impulses which move the human race, or those parts of the human race which stand upon the same plane of civilization, are not broken by mountain heights or broad seas. Their manifestations appear spontaneously and coetaneously in widely separated places.
Before 1830, indeed, as we have so often seen, slavery in the United States had been regarded as a grievous evil by most of the great spirits of the age and country, and schemes for gradual emancipation had been invented, and, in some slight degree, had been put into { 245} operation. It was, however, the humanitarian outburst of 1830, and the succeeding years, which represented slavery as a sin and a crime against the universal principle of human liberty and the rights of man, a sin which called for immediate expiation by instantaneous, unqualified, and uncompensated abolition.
There is nothing strange about the philosophy of Abolition. It is simply the idealistic view of the beginning and the progress of human history. It assumes liberty as the original state of man, condemns every species of modification of liberty suffered by any human being, or any class of human beings, as resulting from the unrighteous act of some other human being, or class or race of human beings, and demands the immediate discontinuance of the tyranny as the only approximately adequate satisfaction which can be made to those who have suffered that tyranny. It is the orthodox, paradisaical view of the origin, unity, and primal perfection of the human race. It is the literal interpretation of the Declaration of Independence. It is thorough-going, radical humanitarianism. Its political principle, in the language of its chief exponent, was: "The world our country, and all mankind our countrymen."
Over against it stands the pessimistic view of man and of civilization, which divides the human race into the few intelligent and good, and the great mass of the ignorant and vicious, and considers the permanent subjection of the latter to the former as the divinely constituted, and therefore the permanent, order of the world.