Indo-China and its primitive people

by Henry Baudesson

A female slave is protected against any abuse of authority by her master. If he violates her she is freed at once by the act.

In Babylon the law was equally favourable to slaves and even went so far as to permit them to contract independently of their masters under the ingenious system of peculium. It was also quite usual for anyone to escape from an embarrassing financial position by entering on a kind of voluntary servitude which could be terminated in time by payment of a sum for redemption out of the earnings of the service. Further, it was enacted by Hammurabi's code, two thousand years before the Christian era, that a creditor, after three years, must set free the wife or daughter of his debtor if he had accepted them as sureties for the debt.

The laws of the Hebrews likewise permitted an insolvent debtor to sell himself and his family into bondage to extinguish a debt. A peculiar feature in this case was the debtor's right to sell his wife or daughters and himself retain his liberty.

The laws of the Annamites forbid this same transaction, but there is no doubt that it frequently takes place. Custom in these matters is of far more force than the law, and the actual nature of the contract is concealed under various disguises.

The Chinese code contains a special provision relating to "The letting on hire of wives or daughters."

Another force working to the same end is the fact that in countries in which individualistic ownership of land prevails, and where labour is scarce the owner stops at nothing to increase the number of hands on his estate. This necessity is the mother of all manner of abuses, to which the weakest naturally fall victims.

The Sorcerers, for example, impose the most exorbitant fines on those who have failed to carry out the least detail of the rites. A penalty thus inflicted constitutes the delinquent to all intents and purposes a slave of the offended Spirit. He has to place himself at the disposal of the Sorcerer, the representative of the deity. Another species of slavery is created by the capture of prisoners of war. There are no provisions in law or custom for their redemption or liberation except by way of exchange. Otherwise the servitude is deemed perpetual.

The independent Moï have recourse to a raid on their neighbours, the Annamites, when their stock of slaves falls low. The prisoner of war is considered as belonging to an inferior order of creation with no status and few rights. A woman may not marry and neither male nor female may inherit; but the law contemplates the case of a free woman marrying a male prisoner of war. The father and the male children become the slaves of the woman. Female children are freed. If the children are all boys or all girls they are divided and one half become the slaves of the other.

In short, although less cruel and inhuman than wholesale slaughter, slavery is one of the most blighting institutions in these barbarous regions. The Moï prefer the milder to the more drastic treatment, not from any motives of altruism but solely from considerations of self-interest. The death of an individual for religious disobedience or even the commission of a crime profits no one, but material benefits accrue both to the private citizen and to the state from the fine imposed or the services exacted as punishment. The most superficial investigation reveals the essential utilitarianism of the conception of justice which obtains among the Moï.

No less utilitarian is their conception of morality. They never ask whether an act is good or bad in itself, for abstract standards of right and wrong are unknown to them. They merely ask whether the act is prejudicial to private or public well-being. It follows from this that crimes against the individual are punished far less severely than crimes against the state, and further that the most serious offences are those which touch material prosperity and enjoyment. A theft of rice from the public granary is punished by enslavement, for rice is the staple food and an indispensable necessity to the whole group. The same theft from a private individual is regarded only as a minor offence punishable summarily by fine. In this case Society does not suffer, or at least only indirectly and to an imperceptible degree.