Many Great Civilizations in history had slaves or built their Great Society on the backs of slave labor. Greek, Roman, Egyptian, British, French, Hungarian, Prussian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Norse, Americans and more held slaves. You can argue the enlightenment of some or all of these societies as you want, but it's the human animal that asserts dominance over the weak and forces them to do their bidding through force, manipulation, coercion, intimidation, and other tactics.
It's a pretty universal thing in the animal kingdom every social species defers to the Alpha of the pack, but since we are more advanced than animals, we assert dominance in more brutal and creative ways (other than simply running off competing males). I think it's very shortsighted to think of
the Mallers simply as "subhuman" and does a disservice to the story by thinking of them simply in one dimension.
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