simply, no more justify the notion that Canaan's slavery was any
magical consequence of the old patriarch's anger than they do the
well-known theory that it was the cause of the Negro's blackness.
Ham shows a low, foul, irreverent, unnatural temper towards his
father. The old man's shame is not a cause of shame to his son, but
only of laughter. Noah prophesies (in the fullest and deepest
meaning of that word) that a curse will come upon that son's son;
that he will be a slave of slaves; and reason and experience show
that he spoke truth. Let the young but see that their fathers have
no reverence for the generation before them, then will they in turn
have no reverence for their fathers. Let them be taught that the
sins of their ancestors involve their own honour so little that they
need not take any trouble to clear the blot off the scutcheon, but
may safely sit down and laugh over it, saying, 'Very likely it is
true. If so, it is very amusing; and if not--what matter?'--Then
those young people are being bred up in a habit of mind which
contains in itself all the capabilities of degradation and slavery,
in self-conceit, hasty assertion, disbelief in nobleness, and all the
other 'credulities of scepticism': parted from that past from which
they take their common origin, they are parted also from each other,
and become selfish, self-seeking, divided, and therefore weak:
disbelieving in the nobleness of those who have gone before them,
they learn more and more to disbelieve in the nobleness of those
around them; and, by denying God's works of old, come, by a just and
dreadful Nemesis, to be unable to see his works in the men of their
own day; to suspect and impugn valour, righteousness,
disinterestedness in their contemporaries; to attribute low motives;
to pride themselves on looking at men and things as 'men who know the
world,' so the young puppies style it; to be less and less chivalrous
to women, less and less respectful to old men, less and less ashamed