The Continental Monthly, Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 | Page 8

than
equal to two in Maryland, and four in South Carolina. So, if we take
our savage tribes, with their huts and tents, their rude agriculture, their
furs, their few and simple household manufactures, their hunting and
fishing, the average product of their annual labor, at four cents a day
each, would be $14.60 a year, or more than a fourth of that of South
Carolina (56.91). So that Massachusetts, in material progress, is farther
in advance of South Carolina than that State is of the savage Indians.
Thus we have the successive steps and gradations of man:
Massachusetts, with free labor and free schools, having reached the
highest point of civilization: South Carolina, with slavery and
ignorance (except the few), in a semi-barbarous stage; and the lowest
savage condition, called barbarous, but nearer to South Carolina than
that State to Massachusetts.
Slavery, then, the Census proves, is hostile to the progress of wealth
and population, to science, literature, and education, to schools,
colleges, and universities, to books and libraries, to churches and
religion, to the press, and therefore to free government; hostile to the
poor, keeping them in want and ignorance; hostile to labor, reducing it
to servitude, and decreasing two thirds the value of its products; hostile
to morals, repudiating among slaves the marital and parental condition,
classifying them by law as chattels, darkening the immortal soul, and
making it a crime to teach millions of human beings to read or write.
And shall labor and education, literature and science, religion and the
press, sustain an institution which is their deadly foe?
The discussion will be continued in my next letter. R. J. WALKER.

PALMER, THE AMERICAN SCULPTOR.
Sculpture as an art is probably anterior to painting. Form being a
simpler quality than color, the means of imitation were found in a
conformity of shape rather than hue. The origin of sculpture is
somewhat obscured in the thickening mists of antiquity, but it was no
doubt one of the earliest symbols of ideas made use of by man. In fact,

in its primitive development, there is considerable evidence to show
that it was the first essay at a recorded language. The Egyptian
hieroglyphics, those mysterious etchings upon the rock, representing
animals, men, and nondescript characters, were unquestionably rude
attempts to hand down to posterity some account of the great events of
those forgotten ages. The next remove in the history of this art is its
employment in the production of the images of idolatrous worship; and,
when confined to this purpose, it never attained any appreciable
excellence. The purely heathen mind was incapable of conceiving those
forms of ideal beauty which are born of the contemplation of a divine
and spiritual beauty revealed in the word of God and the teachings of
his immaculate Son.
The grotesque Egyptian images worshipped on the Nile before the
building of the pyramids, are, judging from the best preserved
antiquities, not very much inferior to the gilded deities to be seen
to-day in the thousand pagodas of heathen lands.
Take for example a Chinese idol of modern make: while it is less
angular and more elaborately finished than the ancient monstrosities
found in Egypt, still, so far as perfection of form or beauty of
expression is concerned, there is little to choose between the two. Each
is a fitting type of the degree of civilization and soul culture of the
peoples that produced them. It must not be urged that the success of
sculpture in Greece and Rome disproves the proposition that the art
could not develop itself among a strictly idolatrous race.
The splendid mythologies of the Greeks and Romans must not be
considered as the highest forms even of the worship of idols or
inanimate things. The gods and goddesses of these mythological
systems were principally the powers that were supposed to preside over
the different forces and elements of nature, and were invested with the
celestial attributes of a higher order of beings. Neptune ruled the sea,
Pluto was director of ceremonies in the infernal regions, while Jupiter
was emperor of the sky and king of all the lesser gods.
These deities were the invention of a cultivated intellect, a refined taste
and polished civilization, and furnish a striking proof of man's longing

after the Infinite, unguided by the star of revelation.
The imaginative Greeks did not worship the statues of the gods per se,
but only admired them as the fitting representations of those mysterious
forces that hold sway over earth, air, fire, and water, or reverenced
them as the symbols of noble sentiments or sublime passions. The thing
itself, the cunning but lifeless figure, was only incidental, while the
idea thus typified was the real incentive to worship. This was also the
age that produced hero worship, and