The writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume 7.
John Greenleaf Whittier, Ed.

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[137] gods, he tells us, are with the strong. Might has a divine right to rule,—blessed are the crafty of brain and strong of hand! Weakness is crime. “Vae victis” as Brennus said when he threw his sword into the scale,—‘Woe to the conquered! The negro is weaker in intellect than his ‘born lord,’ the white man, and has no right to choose his own vocation. Let the latter do it for him, and,’if need be, return to the ‘beneficent whip.’ ‘On the side of the oppressor there is power;’ let him use it without mercy, and hold flesh and blood to the grindstone with unrelenting rigor. Humanity is squeamishness; pity for the suffering mere ‘rose-pink sentimentalism,’ maudlin and unmanly. The gods (the old Norse gods doubtless) laugh to scorn alike the complaints of the miserable and the weak compassions and ‘philanthropisms’ of those who would relieve them. This is the substance of Thomas Carlyle's advice; this is the matured fruit of his philosophic husbandry,—the grand result for which he has been all his life sounding unfathomable abysses or beating about in the thin air of Transcendentalism. Such is the substitute which he offers us for the Sermon on the Mount.

He tells us that the blacks have no right to use the islands of the West Indies for growing pumpkins and garden stuffs for their own use and behoof, because, but for the wisdom and skill of the whites, these islands would have been productive only of ‘jungle, savagery, and swamp malaria.’ The negro alone could never have improved the islands or civilized himself; and therefore their and his ‘born lord,’ the white man, has a right to