"The end is the profit of the master, his security, and the public safety; the subject, one doomed in his own person and his posterity to live without knowledge and without the capacity to make anything his own, and to toil that another may reap the fruit. What moral consideration shall be addressed to such a being to convince him, what it is impossible but that the most stupid must feel and know can never be true--that he is thus to labor upon a principle of natural duty or for the sake of his own personal happiness. Such services can only be expected from one who has no will of his own, who surrenders his will in implicit obedience to that of another. Such obedience is the consequence only of uncontrolled authority over the body. There is nothing else which can operate to produce the effect. The power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect." In making this decision Justice Ruffin did not attempt to justify the rule he had laid down on moral grounds. "As a principle of right," he said, "every person must repudiate it, but in the actual condition of things it must be so; there is no remedy. This discipline belongs to the state of slavery. It constitutes the curse of slavery both to the bond and free portion of our population." Thus it is clear that at the bottom of slavery is the idea that one man's evil is or can be some other man's good. IV Although there was much of evil connected with slavery, much that tended to weaken the master as well as to injure the slave, there was also a brighter, kindlier side to the life of the slave which is not always understood. There was, for example, a great deal of difference between the life of a slave on a plantation in Virginia, where master and slaves grew up together as members of one household, and the life of a slave on a similar plantation further South. In either case a large plantation was always a little kingdom in itself, and in this little kingdom the black man and the white man frequently learned to live together on terms of intimacy and friendship such as would scarcely have been possible under other conditions. On one of these large plantations there were usually several types, or one might almost say castes, among the slaves. There were first of all the house servants, many of whom had grown up from childhood in the "Big House" or mansion of the master. These servants usually became in time very much attached to their masters and their master's children and were often regarded as much a part of the household as any other member of the family. It was to this class that the old servants belonged, of whom so many interesting stories are told, illustrating the devotion of the slaves to their masters.