The generally good and kind-hearted man, who has all his life been used to see his beasts of burden dragging a few pounds' weight above their proper and merciful load, soon comes to regard the extraordinary measure as the proper burden, and to look upon the hapless brute, which is pining away by inches, in imperceptible and insensible decay, as merely performing the work, and filling the station, to perform and fill which it was created. And so, and yet more fatally, as regards the subjugation of man, or a class of men, to man. We commence by degrading, and end by thinking of him as of one naturally degraded. We reduce him to the standard and condition of a brute, then assume that he is but a brute in feelings, intellect, capacity to acquire, and thence argue--in the narrowest of circles--that being but a brute, it is but right and natural to deal with him as what he is. Nor is this tendency of the human mind limited in its operation to actual slavery; but prevails, more or less, in relation to all servitude and inferiority, voluntary or involuntary; so that many of the best, all indeed but the very best, among us, come in the end to look upon all, placed by circumstances and society in inferior positions, as inferiors in very deed, and as naturally unequal to themselves in every capacity, even that of enjoyment, and to regard them, in fact, as a subordinate class of animals and beings of a lower range of creation. This again, still working in a circle, tends really to lower the inferior person; and, by the tendency of association, the inferior class; until degenerating still, as must occur, from sire to son, through centuries, the race itself sinks from social into natural degradation. This had already occurred in a very great degree in the Saxon serfs of England, who had been slaves of Saxons, for many centuries, before the arrival of the Norman conquerors. The latter made but small distinction, in general, between the free-born and the slave of the conquered race, but reduced them all to one common state of misery and real or quasi-servitude--for many, who had once been land-holders and masters, sunk into a state of want and suffering so pitiable and so abject, that, generation succeeding generation with neither the means nor the ambition to rise, they became almost undistinguishable from the original serfs, and in many instances either sold themselves into slavery to avoid actual starvation, or were seized and enslaved, in defiance of all law, in the dark and troublous time which followed the Norman conquest.