put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.”
By providing judges in all the tribes to do equal justice between man and man,[1] and by calling the congregation to judge between the slayer and the avenger of blood,[2] Moses secures the speedy departure of the need of private revenge and the speedy advent of a reign of public law.
The right of Asylum is another primitive institution which is recognised by the Law of Moses; and which was not without use in its day, as the history of the Middle Ages, no less than that of the more ancient barbarism, can bear witness. It gave vengeance time for reflection, and in default of a magistrate armed with sufficient powers, helped to prevent society from becoming a slaughter-house. But this institution also was liable to the grossest abuses. It sheltered the wilful murderer as well as him who had killed a man accidentally or in self-defence, and in the case of wilful murder led to a final defeat of justice. Being connected with holy places and the priests who kept them, it bred gross superstition. For the same reason, and because the asylum was a source of power and profit to the priests, asylums were multiplied till they gave impunity to crime. In the reign of Tiberius the Roman Government found it necessary to interfere with the growing license of setting up asylums in the Greek cities of the Empire. “The temples were filled with the vilest of the slaves; the same receptacles sheltered
