RECAPITULATION AND CONCLUSION. 69 



enter into any theological discussions ; they have been driven 

 to it, and they will no doubt be delighted to hear that their 

 doctrine may become developed without offending anybody. 



The intervention of political and social considerations has 

 not been less injurious to Anthropology than the religious ele- 

 ment. When generous philanthropists claimed, with inde- 

 fatigable constancy, the liberty of the blacks, the partisans of 

 the old system, threatened in their dearest interests, were 

 enchanted to hear that Negros were scarcely human beings, 

 but rather domestic animals, more intelligent and productive 

 than the rest. At that time the scientific question became a 

 question of sentiment, and whoever wished for the abolition of 

 slavery, thought himself bound to admit that Negroes were 

 Caucasians blackened and frizzled by the sun. Now that 

 France and England, the two most civilised nations, have de- 

 finitively emancipated their slaves, science may claim its rights 

 without caring for the sophisms of slaveholders. 



Many honest men think that the moment to speak freely is 

 not yet come, as the emancipation struggle is far from being 

 at an end in the United States of America, and that we should 

 avoid furnishing the slaveholders with arguments. But is it 

 true that the polygenist doctrine, which is scarcely a century 

 old, 1 is any degree responsible for an order of things which 

 has existed from time immemorial, and which has developed 

 and perpetuated itself during a long series of centuries, under 

 the shade of the doctrine of monogenists, which remained so 

 long uncontested ? And can we believe that the slave-owners 

 are much embarrassed to find arguments in the Bible ? The 

 Rev. John Bachmann, a fervent monogenist of South Carolina, 

 has acquired in the Southern States much popularity by demon- 

 strating, with great unction, that slavery is a divine institution. 2 

 It is not from the writings of polygenists, but from the Bible, 



1 [Germs of the polygenist doctrine are, however, as old as Empedocles. See 

 Julius Schvarcz, Geological Theories of the Greeks, 4to, London, 1862, for the 

 most philosophical account of these early attempts. EDITOR.] 



2 We may be permitted to reproduce here some passages from a dissertation 

 of this pious slave owner ; we extract them from the Charleston Medical 

 Journal and Review, Sept. 1854, vol. ix, pp. 657-659 : " All races of men in- 

 cluding the Negroes, are of the same species and origin. The Negro is a 

 striking variety, and at present permanent, as the numerous varieties of 



