servant’s love for his wife and children is mentioned as one of the reasons why he may choose to remain in his servitude when the six years have expired. Thus the husband would never be forcibly separated from his wife and children, though in case he had received a wife from his master (which he would do with his eyes open to the legal consequences) he might have to remain in bondage in order to retain her. The amount of personal right given to the slave by this and the other provisions in his favour is probably as large as would consist with the radical constitution of society in those times: but, as has been said before, the amount of right given was not so important as the principle of giving the slave personal rights at all, which in effect makes him no longer a slave.
The existence of legalized polygamy would tend to save female slaves from becoming the victims of lawless lust, as they were in the Slave States of heathen antiquity, and as they are in the Slave States of America. The general favour shewn by the Mosaic law to purity would tend in the same direction. And so, still more, would the equal distribution of property which it encourages, and which could not fail to bring with it a general simplicity of life, and a freedom from the luxury of which slaves were the wretched ministers in the later age of Rome.
It has also been truly said that such laws as that against muzzling the ox that treads out the corn, and against seething a kid in its mother’s milk, which were intended to soften the heart of the people, and dispose them to a kind treatment even of the animals in their
