Now AFRIC’s coasts thy craftier sons invade
With murder, rapine, theft, − and call it Trade!
− The SLAVE, in chains, on supplicating knee,
Spreads his wide arms, and lifts his eyes to Thee;
With hunger pale, with wounds and toil oppress’d,
“ARE WE NOT BRETHREN?” sorrow choaks the rest; −
− AIR! bear to Heaven upon thy azure flood
Their innocent cries! – EARTH! cover not their blood!’
Note
1 1 This statement comes from a letter to Chastellux quoted in a centenary review of Jefferson’s Notes in The Nation, vol. 58 February 1894. [Editors’ note.]
IIC Changing Ideas and Values
IIC1 David Hume (1711–76) from ‘Of National Characters’
David Hume was one of the leading figures of the European Enlightenment. His philosophical contribution is notable for his scepticism towards explanation rooted in belief rather than reason and openness to the requirements of proof and testability in argument. His occasional essays are more uneven. They can tackle contentious issues and seek by plain discussion to ventilate stale arguments. But they can equally be susceptible to varieties of contemporary prejudice. Hume’s essay on ‘national character’ has won notoriety of late because of a racist footnote he added to the second edition of his Essays Moral, Political and Literary in 1748. In the contemporary intellectual climate of ‘hostility towards metanarratives’, this is frequently taken to be akin to an historical variant of a Freudian slip: the tell‐tale sign that gives the lie to the entire Enlightenment project of universal emancipation from religious power and commitment to scientific progress. It would be idle to maintain that Hume’s footnote is not racist. But then the whole of the essay (which is intended to be a counter to the argument of Montesquieu and others that ‘national character’ is derived from climate and other natural phenomena rather than sociocultural factors) involves a compendium of various instances of nation‐ and class‐based stereotyping current in eighteenth‐century Britain on the cusp of its emergence to world domination. Perhaps the best that can be said is that in his footnote Hume violates his own strictures on assessments of the dignity of human nature in the essay of that title included in the self‐same collection. Its primary lesson goes to a requirement to sort the wheat from the chaff of historical argument rather than to reject the principles of rational argument tout court. The present extracts, which restore the footnote to some of its immediate context, are taken from Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects in Two Volumes containing Essays Moral, Political and Literary. A New Edition, London 1767, vol. 1, pp. 228–32 and 234. (A selection from Hume’s essay on taste can be found in Art in Theory 1648–1815 IIIB5, pp. 506–15.)
The human mind is of a very imitative nature; nor is it possible for any set of men to converse often together, without acquiring a similitude of manners, and communicating to each other their vices as well as their virtues … Where a number of men are united into one political body, the occasions of their intercourse must be so frequent, for defence, commerce, and government, that together with the same speech or language they must acquire a resemblance in their manners, and have a common or national character, as well as a personal one, peculiar to each individual. Now tho’ nature produces all kinds of temper and understanding in great abundance, it follows not that she always produces them in like proportions, and that in every society the ingredients of industry and indolence, valour and cowardice, humanity and brutality, wisdom and folly, will be mixed after the same manner. In the infancy of society, if any of these dispositions be found in greater abundance than the rest, it will naturally prevail in the composition, and give a tincture to the natural character. […]
If we run over the whole globe, or revolve all the annals of history, we shall discover every where signs of this sympathy or contagion of manners, none of the influence of air or climate.
We may observe that where a very extensive government has been established for many centuries, it spreads a national character over the whole empire, and communicates to every part a similitude of manners. Thus the Chinese have the greatest uniformity of character imaginable; tho’ the air and climate, in different parts of those vast dominions, admit of very considerable variations.
In small governments, which are contiguous, the people have notwithstanding a different character, and are often as distinguishable in their manners as the most distant nations. Athens and Thebes were but a short day’s journey from each other; tho’ the Athenians were as remarkable for ingenuity, politeness, and gaiety, as the Thebans for dullness, rusticity, and a phlegmatic temper. Plutarch, discoursing of the effects of air on the minds of men, observes that the inhabitants of the Piraeum possessed very different tempers from those of the higher town of Athens, which was distant about four miles from the former: But I believe no one attributes the difference of manners, in Wapping and St James’s, to a difference of air or climate. […]
Where any accident, as a difference of language or religion, keeps two nations inhabiting the same country from mixing with each other, they will preserve, during several centuries, a distinct and even opposite set of manners. The integrity, gravity, and bravery of the Turks, form an exact contrast to the deceit, levity, and cowardice of the modern Greeks.
The same set of manners will follow a nation, and adhere to them over the whole globe, as well as the same laws and language. The Spanish, English, French and Dutch colonies are all distinguishable even between the tropics.
The manners of a people change very considerably from one age to another; either by great alterations in their government, by the mixtures of new people, or by that inconstancy to which all human affairs are subject. The ingenuity and industry of the ancient Greeks have nothing in common with the stupidity and indolence of the present inhabitants of those regions. Candour, bravery, and love of liberty formed the character of the ancient Romans; as subtilty, cowardice, and a slavish disposition do that of the modern … Though some few strokes of French character be the same with that which Caesar has ascribed to the Gauls, yet what comparison between the civility, humanity, and knowledge of the modern inhabitants of that country, and the ignorance, barbarity, and grossness of the ancient? […]
If the characters of men depended on the air and climate, the degrees of heat and cold should naturally be expected to have a mighty influence, since nothing has a greater effect on all plants and irrational animals. And indeed there is some reason to think that all nations which live beyond the polar circles or between the tropics are inferior to the rest of the species, and are utterly incapable of all the higher attainments of the human mind. The poverty and misery of the northern inhabitants of the globe, and the indolence of the southern, from their few necessities, may, perhaps, account for this remarkable difference, without our having recourse to physical causes. This however is certain, that the characters of nations are very promiscuous in the temperate climates, and that almost all the general observations, which have been formed of the more southern or more northern nations in these climates, are found to be uncertain and fallacious.1
IIC2 Jean‐Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) from ‘A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences’
Rousseau is widely associated with the concept of the ‘noble savage’ (cf. IC12). In fact he never uses the term; nonetheless, the underlying idea is at the heart of his work. His argument is the polar opposite of Hobbes, who regards the state of nature as a condition of internecine warfare (cf. IC10). For Hobbes, civilization represents progress out of that condition and requires a strong ruler to sustain it. For Rousseau, by contrast, those ills are the ills not of the state of nature but of society. The state of nature is not particularly benign, but it is not