yeah well both Yale and Princeton have a long reputation for housing the successors of the robber barons and finding new ways to promote those views, however so 'liberally'.

It's important to keep in mind that Spencer, even Huxley, had little more than a few years of formal eduation. They may have been well read but their early foundational ideas existed very much in the vacuums of their own minds to a large extent. There wasn't any discourse and no one to discourse or clarify with.

And important to note, that slavery came to America from england. Everyone points to america when the word 'slavery' is mentioned but it was a British trade, modern England was built by the fortunes of slave traders and keepers.. the plantations of America, the east India company... all setup to provide imperial England with wealth.

How it is 125 years after the american revolution that we suddenly widely accept England's poor laws and class system stereotypes in the guise of science really makes me wonder.

I chuckle sadly reading darwin's notes about savage natives in the Voyage of the Beagle memoirs. It's as if he never visited the workhouses of Britain and saw the poverty on his own shores. Probably he did not.