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

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[136] infidel Hobbes, that every man, being by nature at war with every other man, has a perpetual right to reduce him to servitude if he has the power. It is the cardinal doctrine of what John Quincy Adams has very properly styled the Satanic school of philosophy,—the ethics of an old Norse sea robber or an Arab plunderer of caravans. It is as widely removed from the sweet humanities and unselfish benevolence of Christianity as the faith and practice of the East India Thug or the New Zealand cannibal.

Our author does not, however, take us altogether by surprise. He has before given no uncertain intimations of the point towards which his philosophy was tending. In his brilliant essay upon Francia of Paraguay, for instance, we find him entering with manifest satisfaction and admiration into the details of his hero's tyranny. In his Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell—in half a dozen pages of savage and almost diabolical sarcasm directed against the growing humanity of the age, the ‘rose-pink sentimentalisms,’ and squeamishness which shudders at the sight of blood and infliction of pain—he prepares the way for a justification of the massacre of Drogheda. More recently he has intimated that the extermination of the Celtic race is the best way of settling the Irish question; and that the enslavement and forcible transportation of her poor, to labor under armed taskmasters in the Colonies, is the only rightful and proper remedy for the political and social evils of England. In the Discourse on Negro Slavery we see this devilish philosophy in full bloom. The