We turn now to the resulting conditions of the slaves. They were at the bottom, the most brutally exploited and, therefore, the most despised section of the laboring class. For it is a consequent of the law stated above that those who are exploited must needs be despised by those who exploit them. This mental attitude of the superior class (which makes the laws of that society in which it is dominant) will naturally find its expression in those actions by which they establish their relations to the inferior class. And whenever anyone is to be kicked it is usually the man farthest down who gets it, because he is most contiguous to the foot. So the Negro having been given a place at the bottom in the economic life of the nation, came to occupy naturally the place at the bottom in the nation's thinking. I say, the nation's advisedly; because the dominant ideas of any society which is already divided into classes are as a rule the ideas preservative of the existing arrangements. But since those arrangements include a class on top, the dominant ideas will generally coincide with the interest of that class. The ethics of its own advantage, then, will be diffused by that class throughout that society—will be, if need arise imposed upon the other classes, since every ruling class has always controlled the public instruments for the diffusion of ideas. In this way the slave-holding section of the dominant class in America first diffused its own necessary contempt for the Negro among the other sections of the ruling class, and the ideas of this class as a whole became through the agency of press, pulpit and platform, the ideas of "the American People" on the Negro. In further application of the materialistic method to this subject, it is curious and interesting to note how the southern attitude toward the Negro changed with the changing industrial system. When the wasteful agricultural methods of chattel slavery had exhausted the soil of the south and no new land loomed up on the horizon of the system, slavery began to decay. The planters of that section settled down into the patriarchal type of family relations with their slaves, who were then simply a means of keeping the master's hands free from the contamination of work and not a means of ever-increasing profits. Slavery was then in a fair way to die of its own weight. But with the invention of Whitney's cotton-gin, which enabled one man to do the work of three hundred, cotton came to the front as the chief agricultural staple in America. The black slave became a source of increasing revenue as a fertilizer of capital. The idyllic relations of the preceding forty years came to a sudden end. Increased profits demanded increased exploitation and the ethics of advantage dictated the despising of the Negro.