slave law to guard, Hebrew agriculture could offer no temptations.
Plato in his Laws prescribes that if a slave kills a freeman he shall be given up to the kinsmen of the slain man, who are not permitted on any account to spare his life, but are to be allowed to put him to death in any way they please. If a man kills the slave of another, the philosopher would have him pay double the slave’s price to the master; but if he kills his own slave he is only required to go through the ceremony of purification, in order that the land may not be defiled with blood.[1] But the law of Moses says, “Ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land; and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.” If we look at the Mosaic dispensation in itself we may regard it as peculiarly ceremonial, but if we compare it with any other dispensation except the Christian we shall probably find that instead of being peculiarly ceremonial, it is peculiarly moral.
And moreover, it is to be remembered that if the servant or slave was the “money” of his master, so, as we have seen, in some cases, was the wife; and that if the head of the family had a power which civilized morality would not endure over his servants, he had also, as we have likewise seen, a power which civilized morality would not endure over his child. In the Roman family all these prerogatives of the household despot hung together. American writers on the “Phi-
- ↑ Laws, bk. ix., p. 868.
