ife and death at pleasure."

Kane gives shocking instances of this. He tells of a chief who
sacrificed five slaves to a colossal wooden idol he had set up and
says that the unfortunate slaves were not considered entitled even to
burial but their bodies were cast out to the crows and vultures.

Amongst the French such an extreme of barbarity did not obtain. Their
law was based upon the civil law, that is, the law of Rome, which in
its developed form recognized the slave as a human being. The Roman
world was full of slaves. Not only were there slaves born but debtors
sometimes sold themselves[14] or their children. The criminal might be
enslaved. In early pagan times the slave had no rights. He was a
chattel disposable according to the will of his master who had _jus
vitae necisque_, who could slay, mutilate, scourge at pleasure.[15] In
the course of time this extreme power was restrained. Hadrian forbade
the killing of slaves, Marius allowed the slave to lay an information
against his master. The prefect at Rome and the presidents of the
provinces took cognizance of crimes against the slave; and Constantine
allowed a master to go free on killing his slave in chastisement only
if he used rods or whips, but not if he used sticks, stones or
javelins or tortured him to death.[16] Hard as was his lot, the
unhappy slave had at least some rights in the later civil law, few
and slight as they were, and these he had under the Coutume de Paris,
the law of French Canada.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] For example in Garneau's _Histoire du Canada_ (1st Edit) Vol. 2,
p. 447 after speaking of correspondence of 1688-9 referred to in the
text he says of the answer of the authorities in Paris:

"C'etait assez pour faire echouer une enterprise, qui aurait greffe
sur notre societe la grande et terrible plaie qui paralyse la force
d'une portion si considerable de l'Union Americaine, l'_esclavage_,
cette plaie inconnue sous notre ciel du Nord"--"That was effective to
strand a scheme which would have engrafted upon our society that great
and terrible plague which paralyses the energies of so considerable a
part of the American Union, Slavery, that plague unknown under our
northern sky."

[2] He was sold by David Kertk or Kirke the first English Conqueror of
Quebec. England held her conquest only from 1629 to 1632, if it be
permissible to call Kirke's possession that of England when he was
repudiated by his country.

_Relations des Jesuites_, 163