First Sentence

"I HAD prepared an elaborate chapter relating the history of slavery among mankind, and showing how it begins to arise as an institution at the level of the highest savages, how it expands and reaches its most miserable phases at the highest barbarian level; how it still expands at the level of the lower civilisation, but loses much of its atrocity; how it then begins to die away, not as the result of teaching or any extraneous influence, but purely as the consequence of elimination, man as seen in a cultured community having a more sympathetic nerve reaction than man on the barbarian level."