cated
on totally different principles. The man stolen might be past labor, and
his support a _burden_, yet death was the penalty, though not a cent's
worth of _property value_ was taken. The penalty for stealing _property_
was a mere _property penalty_. However large the amount stolen, the
payment of _double_ wiped out the score. It might have a greater _money_
value than a _thousand_ men, yet _death_ was never the penalty, nor
maiming, nor branding, nor even _stripes_. Whatever the kind, or the
amount stolen, the unvarying penalty was double of _the same kind_. Why
was not the rule uniform? When a _man_ was stolen why not require the
thief to restore _double of the same kind--two men_, or if he had sold
him, _five_ men? Do you say that the man-thief might not _have_ them? So
the _ox_-thief might not have two _oxen_, or if he had killed it,
_five_. But if God permitted men to hold _men_ as property, equally with
_oxen_, the _man_-thief could get _men_ with whom to pay the penalty, as
well as the _ox_-thief, _oxen_.

Further, when _property_ was stolen, the whole of the legal penalty was
a compensation to the person injured. But when a _man_ was stolen, no
property compensation was offered. To tender _money_ as an equivalent,
would have been to repeat the outrage with the intolerable aggravations
of supreme insult and impiety. Compute the value of a MAN in _money!_
Throw dust into the scale against immortality! The law recoiled from
such outrage and blasphemy. To have permitted the man-thief to expiate
his crime by restoring double, would have been making the repetition of
crime its atonement. But the infliction of death for _man-stealing_
exacted from the guilty wretch the utmost possibility of reparation. It
wrung from him, as he gave up the ghost, a testimony in blood, and death
groans, to the infinite dignity and worth of man,--a proclamation to the
universe, voiced in mortal agony, that MAN IS INVIOLABLE,--a confession
shrieked in phrenzy at the grave's mouth--"I die accursed, and God is
just."

If God permitted man to hold _man_ as property, why did He punish for
stealing _that_ kind of property infinitely more than for stealing any
_other_ kind of property? Why did he punish with _death_ for stealing a
very little, perhaps not a sixpence worth, of _that_ sort of property,
and make a mere _fine_, the penalty for stealing a thousand times as
much, of any other sort of property--especially if God did by his own
act