The mass of the negroes are more unchaste now than they were in slavery, a subject of which I shall say something further in another chapter. But even where the master's steady requirement from one generation to another of a stricter observance of family ties, and the natural imitation of the ways of the dominant race, had lifted the slaves, in appearance at least, far above their West African ancestors, not even mothers had become chaste. Boys, girls, men, and women, both married and unmarried, were as promiscuous by night as houseflies are by day. The horror of horrors in this abyss of moral impurity to one of a superior race was their utter unconsciousness of incest.[93] Mrs. Stowe has their philoprogenitiveness--as phrenologists call it--as fully developed as the whites. One bred in the cotton districts well remembers that it required all the vigilance of master and mistress, overseer, and the deputies selected from the older slave women, to secure from the mothers proper attention to their children, and especially to keep them from punishing too cruelly. But I do not mean to say that this parental misbehavior was as general as the unchastity mentioned. When the mothers aged beyond forty-five or fifty, they would begin to think somewhat less of beaux and somewhat more of their children. George Harris and Eliza are next of the slave characters in prominence and importance to Uncle Tom. With their large admixture of white blood, their comparatively good education and superb moral training, a southerner would think that you were merely mocking him if you named these as fairly representative negroes. As they are drawn, they are really whites--whites of high refinement--with only a physical negro exterior, and that softened down to the minimum. But Uncle Tom--I pray my northern readers to take counsel of their common sense and consider what I shall now say of him. Rightly to estimate him, I must begin with some contrasts. The first that occurs to me is Tyndarus, the slave hero of the Captivi of Plautus, pronounced by the great critic Lessing to be the most beautiful play ever brought upon the stage. Tyndarus and Philocrates, his young master, taken prisoners, are sold to Hegio. The two captives personate each other, and induce Hegio to send home Philocrates, who was a wealthy noble, and keep only the born slave. Hegio was scheming to recover his own son, now a slave in the land of the captives, by a bargain for Philocrates, this bargain to be negotiated by the counterfeit Tyndarus. Discovering how he had been duped, the anguished father tells the real Tyndarus that he shall die a cruel death. This is the reply of the slave: "As I shall not die because of evil deeds, that is a small matter. My death will keep it ever in remembrance that I delivered my master from slavery and the enemy, restored him to his country and father, and chose that I myself should perish rather than he."