its lowliness, its conscious destitution of all merit, and
deep sense of all ill desert? If this is _humility_, put it on stilts,
and set it a strutting, while pride takes lessons, and blunders in
apeing it.

Here let it be observed, that both Israelites and Strangers, belonged
indiscriminately to _each_ class of the servants, the _bought_ and the
_hired_. That those in the former class, whether Jews or Strangers, were
in higher estimation, and rose to honors and authority in the family
circle, which were not conferred on _hired_ servants, has been already
shown. It should be added, however, that in the enjoyment of privileges,
merely _political_ and _national_, the hired servants from the
_Israelites_, were more favored than either the hired, or the bought
servants from the _Strangers_. No one from the Strangers, however
wealthy or highly endowed, was eligible to the highest office, nor could
he own the soil. This last disability seems to have been one reason for
the different periods of service required of the two classes of bought
servants--the Israelites and the Strangers. The Israelite was to serve
six years--the Stranger until the jubilee[A].

[Footnote A: Both classes may with propriety be called _permanent_
servants; even the bought Israelite, when his six-years' service is
contrasted with the brief term of the hired servant.]

As the Strangers could not own the soil, nor even houses, except within
walled towns, most of them would choose to attach themselves permanently
to Israelitish families. Those Strangers who were wealthy, or skilled in
manufactures, instead of becoming servants themselves, would need
servants for their own use, and as inducements for the Strangers to
become servants to the Israelites, were greater than persons of their
own nation could hold out to them, these wealthy Strangers would
naturally procure the poorer Israelites for servants. See Levit. xxv.
47. In a word, such was the political condition of the Strangers, the
Jewish polity furnished a strong motive to them, to become servants,
thus incorporating themselves with the nation, and procuring those
social and religious privileges already enumerated, and for their
children in the second generation, a permanent inheritance. (This last
was a regulation of later date. Ezekiel xlvii. 21-23.) Indeed, the
structure of the whole Mosaic polity, was a virtual bounty offered to
those who would become permanent servants, and merge in the Jewis