St. Clare believes that slavery is a sick, evil system that degrades both slave and master. The slaves have to be kept in a state of degradation, he says, or they would rebel against the harsh way they are treated and gain their freedom. Because of this, they are kept ignorant and coarse, without any education, whipped and brutalized, used with cruelty and without love or compassion. Yet at the same, they live in close quarters with their masters, and with the children of their masters, who are infected and brutalized by their contact with them. As he puts it:
The land groans under it; and, bad as it is for the slave, it is worse, if anything, for the master. It takes no spectacles to see that a great class of vicious, improvident, degraded people, among us, are an evil to us, as well as to themselves. ... They are in our homes; they are the associates of our children, and they form their minds faster than we can; for they are a race that children always will cling to and assimilate...
(The entire section contains 2 answers and 574 words.)
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