I may be allowed to translate the eloquent words in which
the French historian of slavery, in whose great work the history of
ancient slavery is treated as only a scholar-statesman can treat it,
sums up this aspect of the subject:
"Emancipation, prevalent as it might appear to be towards the
beginning of the Empire, was not a step towards the suppression of
slavery, but a natural and inevitable sequence of the institution
itself,--an outlet for excess in an epoch overabundant in slaves: a
means of renewing the mass, corrupted by the deleterious influence
of its own condition, before it should be totally ruined. As water,
diverted from its free course, becomes impure in the basin which
imprisons it, and when released, will still retain its impurity; so
it is not to be thought that instincts perverted by slavery, habits
depraved from childhood, could be reformed and redressed in the slave
by a tardy liberation. Thrust into the midst of a society itself
vitiated by the admixture of slavery, he only became more
unrestrainedly, more dangerously bad.
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