Note 46 — BOOK IX. CONCERNING FUGITIVES AND REFUGEES.

The great value of slaves, as articles of personal property, and the manifest sympathy of the people with them, seem to have prompted the enactment of this law, by which the inhabitants of an entire district were to be turned into a corps of detectives for the capture of fugitives; and the severest penalties were denounced against all, irrespective of age, sex, social standing, or rank, for non-compliance with its provisions. The statement that no community, large or small, was without a number of fugitive slaves, who, sure of the assistance of their neighbors, scarcely took the trouble to conceal themselves, indicates that human servitude was not popular with the majority of the people of the Iberian Peninsula. It would appear, also, that the magistrates, whose executive delinquencies rendered them liable to the same punishment as the offenders themselves, were frequently loth to execute the law. The marked consideration always shown the clergy by their legislative brethren, is again disclosed by the amusing inequality of penalties prescribed for the neglect of official duties. There is a great and painful difference between the limitation to one meal a day, for a month (a privation, it is hardly necessary to add, which might be readily evaded) and two hundred lashes, laid on vigorously with a scourge. This law gives us a curious insight into life in those times, and one that could have been derived from no other source; and it is especially instructive in the information it affords concerning the feelings entertained by all, except the comparatively few members of the privileged classes, towards those in the servile condition.—[Ed.]