This is an amazing article. Writings about slave holders all seem to fall into two sorts. One defends them and says they are the finest of people, and the very

This is an amazing article. Writings about slave holders all seem to fall into two sorts. One defends them and says they are the finest of people, and the very foundation of civilization. The other sort says they are evil through and through. This article instead gets at the actual reality of their psychology, which turns out to be a lot more complicated. Let me add one point, which is that slavery seems to largely be a function of economics and the level of technology of a society. In nomadic foraging societies, from what I have read, slavery is unknown because it is impractical and has no economic value. But with agriculture slavery becomes possible and can produce great wealth and many other sorts of value, and so it becomes wide-spread. But then with industrialization it again becomes uneconomic, and so is abolished. What the article describes quite clearly is a country moving from a largely agrarian economy to an industrial one, and how slavery is being slowly eliminated in the process.