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Most of the gentle folks in Virginia and the Carolinas, the men who lived in great roomy houses on their well-stocked and slave-tilled plantations, had been forced to struggle hard to keep their heads above water during the Revolution.
By the time Europe had wearied of the sword, the fatality attending high living, large slave-tilled estates, the love of official society, and the defective education of the young men of tide-water Virginia and Maryland, produced a new class of native-born errants and broken profligates at Washington, and many a life whose memories began with a coach-and-four and a park of deer ended them between the coverlets of a poor-house bed.
It is easy to see why Rome trended downward when great slave-tilled farms spread over what had once been a country-side of peasant proprietors, when greed and luxury and sensuality ate like acids into the fibre of the upper classes, while the mass of the citizens grew to depend not upon their own exertions, but upon the State, for their pleasures and their very livelihood.
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