CW XXI, p. 288.
37
CW XXI, pp. 324–5.
38
Page -18-
superiors to dependents is the nursery of these vices of character, which, wherever
else they exist, are an overflowing from that source. A man who is morose or violent
to his equals, is sure to be one who has lived among inferiors, whom he could frighten
or worry into submission.
37
And in a later chapter of this work he repeats the point, making explicit the analogy between the
position of husband and that of slave-driver:
[S]ervitude, except when it actually brutalises, though corrupting to both, is less so
to the slaves than to the slave-masters. It is wholesomer for the moral nature to be
restrained, even by arbitrary power, than to be allowed to exercise arbitrary power
without restraint. Women, it is said, seldomer fall under the penal law—contribute
a much smaller number of offenders to the criminal calendar, than men. I doubt not
that the same thing may be said, with the same truth, of negro slaves. Those who are
under the control of others cannot often commit crimes, unless at the command and
for the purposes of their masters.
38
Mill takes the experience of the American South to provide ample evidence for the claim that the
experience of arbitrary power over their slaves tends to instill certain vices in slave owners. In his
1862 essay “The Slave Power,” he quotes a passage from Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State
of Virginia” in which the latter says that the relation between slave and master involves:
. . . a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions—the most unremitting
despotism on the one hand, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see
Convention