HOW TO TURN A FREE PEOPLE INTO SLAVES

"It is not difficult to see that this is a highly unhealthy system to have in a free society. In fact, the logic is reminiscent of another system of domestic dictatorship that once tried unsuccessfully to co-exist with free civil government. Politically, the most powerful argument against slavery – and what eventually did more than any other to bring about the realization of how threatening it was to democratic freedom – was less its physical cruelty than its moral degeneracy: the tyrannical habits it encouraged in the slaveholder, the servile ones it fostered in the slave, and the moral degradation it engendered in both. Such dispositions were said to be incompatible with the kind of republican virtue required for free self-government."