"No formation is incapable of becoming diseased in one or more ways. Several anomalies coexisting in an organ commonly stand to each other in the relation of cause and effect. Thus, deviation in texture determines deviation in size, in form."
The following pages will demonstrate that nations and communities may become diseased in many ways; and that in proportion as their social textures deviate from the normal, do they become more and more deformed and demoralized.
"All anomalies of organization involving any anatomical change manifest themselves as deviations in the quantity or quality of organic creation, or else as a mechanical separation of continuity. They are reducible to irregular number, size, form, continuity, and contents."
Oppressions, tyrannies, domestic slavery, chattelhood, are so many mechanical separations of continuity, which in the social organic creation is liberty.
"General disease engenders the most various organs and textures according to their innate, general or individual tendencies, either spontaneously or by dint of some overpowering outward impulse, a local affection which reflects the general disease in the peculiarity of its products. The general disease becomes localized, and, so to speak, represented in the topical affection."
Violence and oppression generated various and peculiar forms of servitude, until nearly all of them ended in chattelhood, which many are wont to consider as a topical affection of certain races and nations. Declining Greece and Rome in the past, Russia under our own eyes, serve as illustrations.
"A general disease not unfrequently finds in its localization a perpetual focus of derivation, with seeming integrity of the organism in other respects."
So nations infected with slavery, nevertheless had brilliant epochs of existence; and this "seeming integrity of the organism" misleads many otherwise averse to chattelhood, and makes them indifferent to its existence.
"Where several diseases coexist in an individual, they are in part primary, in part secondary and subordinate, although homologous to the former."