The origin and development of the moral ideas

The rule that the life of a slave is held in less estimation than the life of a freeman applies to the nations of archaic culture; yet not even the master is among them in all circumstances allowed to put his slave to death. In ancient Mexico the murder of a slave, though committed by the master, was a capital offence.35 In Corea, a slave may not be killed by his owner before the latter has obtained the permission of the board of punishments, or of the high provincial authorities.36 According to the Chinese Penal Code, a master who, instead of complaining to a magistrate privately, beats to death a slave who has been guilty of theft, adultery, or any other similar crime, shall be punished with one hundred blows. If he beats to death, or intentionally kills, a slave who has committed no crime, he shall be punished with sixty blows and one year’s banishment, and the wife or husband, as also the children, of the deceased slave shall be entitled to their freedom.37 Again, a freeman who kills another’s slave shall be strangled.38

According to Hebrew law, a master who smites his slave so that he dies under his hand, “shall be surely punished”; but if the slave continues to live for a day or two after the assault, the master goes free on the score that the slave is “his money.”39 Muhammed strongly enjoined the duty of kindness to slaves; yet, according to Muhammedan law, the master may even kill his own slave with impunity for any offence, and incurs but a slight punishment—as imprisonment for a period at the discretion of the judge—if he kills him wantonly.40 The price of blood for a slave is his or her value; but by the Ḥanafee law a man is obnoxious to capital punishment for the murder of another man’s slave.41

Among the ancient Teutons the master was irresponsible in the eye of the law as to all dealings between himself and his slave; legally the slave was on a par with the horse and the ox, and to kill him was only to inflict a certain loss upon the owner.42 In ancient Wales the position of a slave seems to have been very similar; there was no galanas for a bondman, “only payment of his worth to his master, like the worth of a beast.”43 Among the Greeks, in the Homeric age, the master evidently could punish his slaves with death;44 but in later times, at least at Athens, he was obliged to hand over to the magistrate any slave of his who deserved capital punishment.45 What happened to a master who killed his own slave we do not know exactly, but at any rate he had to undergo a ceremony of purification.46 Plato says in his ‘Laws,’ that if a person kills the slave of another in anger, he shall pay twice the amount of the loss to his owner.47 But he adds, “If any one kills a slave who has done no wrong, because he is afraid that he may inform of some base and evil deeds of his own, or for any similar reason, in such a case let him pay the penalty of murder, as he would have done if he had slain a citizen.”48

In Rome, in ancient times, the master had by law the absolute power of life and death over his slaves; and he who killed another man’s slave was not criminally prosecuted, but had merely to compensate the owner for the destruction of his property.49 Even during the Empire a slave was counted a thing, not a person; himself incapable of suffering an injuria, he was viewed as a mechanical medium only, through which an insult could be transmitted to his master.50 Yet this doctrine was not rigidly adhered to. After the publication of the Lex Cornelia, the change was introduced that he who killed a slave belonging to somebody else could be punished for murder;51 and later on even the master’s power of life and death was restricted by law. Claudius declared that sick slaves who had been exposed by their owners in a languishing condition, and afterwards recovered, should be perfectly free and never more return to their former servitude; moreover, “if any one chose to kill at once, rather than expose, a slave, he should be liable for murder.”52 By a constitution of Antoninus Pius he who put his slave to death without a sufficient cause (sine causa) was to be punished equally with him who killed the slave of another.53 Hadrian even made an attempt to induce slave-owners to hand over to the authorities slaves who had been guilty of some capital crime, instead of themselves inflicting the punishment on the guilty.54