She began with emancipating the serfs of her own particular domain. She emancipated all those of the ecclesiastical domains. She might thus be said to have created men out of slaves.
The prelates and monks were paid out of the public treasury. Punishments were proportioned to crimes, and the punishments were of a useful character; offenders were for the greater part condemned to labor on public works, as the dead man can be of no service to the living.
The torture was abolished, because it punishes a man before he is known to be guilty; because the Romans never put any to the torture but their slaves; and because torture tends to saving the guilty and destroying the innocent.
This important business had proceeded thus far, when Mustapha III., the son of Mahmoud, obliged the empress to suspend her code and proceed to fighting.
SECTION II.
I have attempted to discover some ray of light in the mythological times of China which precede Fohi, but I have attempted in vain.
At the period, however, in which Fohi flourished, which was about three thousand years before the new and common era of our northwestern part of the world, I perceive wise and mild laws already established by a beneficent sovereign. The ancient books of the Five Kings, consecrated by the respect of so many ages, treat of the institution of agriculture, of pastoral economy, of domestic economy, of that simple astronomy which regulates the different seasons, and of the music which, by different modulations, summoned men to their respective occupations. Fohi flourished, beyond dispute, more than five thousand years ago. We may therefore form some judgment of the great antiquity of an immense population, thus instructed by an emperor on every topic that could contribute to their happiness. In the laws of that monarch I see nothing but what is mild, useful and amiable.
I was afterwards induced to inspect the code of a small nation, or horde, which arrived about two thousand years after the period of which we have been speaking, from a frightful desert on the banks of the river Jordan, in a country enclosed and bristled with peaked mountains. These laws have been transmitted to ourselves, and are daily held up to us as the model of wisdom. The following are a few of them:
"Not to eat the pelican, nor the ossifrage, nor the griffin, nor the ixion, nor the eel, nor the hare, because the hare ruminates, and has not its foot cloven."
"Against men sleeping with their wives during certain periodical affections, under pain of death to both of the offending parties."