XI. MORAL MISALLIANCES. “The thistle in Lebanon sent to the cedar in Lebanon, saying, Give thy daughter to my son for a wife.” HIS is one of the earliest instances of what THIS we call a fable. Fables, like proverbs, are the exponents of a popular wisdom. The good sense of a nation and age sums itself up in such a little parable as this. It is meant to show the disadvantages of a misalliance. It has the same moral as the fable of Æsop concerning the collier who asked the fuller to come and live with him. Inconsistent unions and their evils are objected to here. In nature, however, there cannot be any such inconsistent unions. The thistle and cedar never marry. Tribes, orders, genera, species, are preserved from intermingling by some fixed law. We do not exactly know what a species is, but we know at least this, that there are boundaries in the animal and vegetable kingdoms which cannot now be over passed. This law keeps races distinct, and prevents intermixture. There are no hybrid races. If there were, the whole organized world would be a scene of confusion. The peach tree and almond breed together, but are held therefore to be of the same species, the peach being only a variety of the almond. "If the peach were, indeed, a distinct species, where was it concealed," says Pritchard, "from the creation until the reign of Claudius Cæsar?" The old botanists arranged plants according to an artificial order, founded on one or two features of their organization, making a very cumbrous system, hard to understand and difficult to remember. The modern botanists have a natural method of arrangement, by which plants come together that are really alike; not those which resemble each other only in such a number of stamens and pistils. Society in America has the advantage over society in Europe that it follows the natural order of arrangement. The system of elective affinities prevails so powerfully that no caste system can succeed here. It may be attempted in such great cities as New York and Philadelphia, but the whole stress of things is against it. Nature forbids misalliances by establishing the boundary of specific differences between different tribes of animals and plants. Thus we have variety, but not confusion, in the world; thousands of animals, thousands of plants, keeping themselves distinct, capable of being improved, but remaining essentially the same, the violet always a violet, the bee just such an insect now, with the same habits and instincts, as when Samson propounded his riddle to the Philistines. If the vegetable and animal kingdoms had been constituted differently, the result would have been worse. We should have had confusion instead of harmony. We must must have varieties first, then we can have union. "All Nature's difference makes all Nature's peace." Social man has attempted to imitate these arrangements of nature by means of a system of caste. This has been carried to the greatest extreme in India. Gangooly tells us there are thirty-four castes in India, and no man can get out of his caste by any effort. A weaver can no more change into a barber or shoemaker than a dog can change into an elephant, or an apple tree into a maple. The same distinction of castes appears in western society. There are high and low castes, Brahmins and Sudras, in Europe. These distinctions are more marked and regarded with more favor in England than elsewhere. Tennyson's beautiful poem of "The Lord of Burleigh" is founded on the fact of a misalliance in one of the great English houses, and the moral of the poem seems to be the danger and impropriety of such marriages. Their penalty, according to the poet, is death. It is a capital offence in England, according to Tennyson, to marry above your rank. |