Violence and oppression generated various and peculiar forms of servitude, until nearly all of them ended in chattelhood, which many are wont to consider as a topical affection of certain races and nations. Declining Greece and Rome in the past, Russia under our own eyes, serve as illustrations. "A general disease not unfrequently finds in its localization a perpetual focus of derivation, with _seeming_ integrity of the organism in other respects." So nations infected with slavery, nevertheless had brilliant epochs of existence; and this "_seeming_ integrity of the organism" misleads many otherwise averse to chattelhood, and makes them indifferent to its existence. "Where several diseases coexist in an individual, they are in part _primary_, in part _secondary_ and subordinate, although homologous to the former." So many evils are the lot of human society, but almost all of them are secondary and subordinate to oppression, violence, and slavery. "_The issue of a local disease_ in health consists either in the perfect re-establishment of the normal condition, or else in partial recovery; more or fewer important residua and sequellæ of the disease not incomparable with a tolerably fair state of health, remaining entailed." The history of the slow recovery of post-Roman Europe from domestic bondage justifies the application of this pathologic axiom to the social condition of nations. "_Issue in death_: 1. Through exhaustion of power and of organic matter." The history of republican, but above all, of imperial Rome, demonstrates that its decline and death were caused through the extinction of freedom, free labor, and the free yeomanry, which in every state constitutes _the power, the organic matter_ of a nation. "2. Through the suspended function of organs essential to life, through palsy, etc." When the laboring classes are enslaved, the life of a nation is speedily palsied. "3. Through vitiation of the blood." What blood is to the animal organism, sound social and political principles are to society. When such principles become vitiated, the nation is on the path of decline and death. "The worst malformation is never so anomalous as not to hear the general character of animal life, etc. Even an individual organ never departs from its normal character so completely that amid even the greatest disfigurement, this character should not be cognizable." So often the enslaver and the slaveholding community may preserve _some_ features of the normal human character, notwithstanding the "disfigurement" produced. "The excessive development of one part determines the imperfect and retarded development of another, and the converse." So the oligarchic development retards the growth and advancement of the laboring classes, whether the hue be white or black: it prevents or retards the culture and civilization of individuals and communities.