disgraces the statute-book, though the force of public opinion and the charitable perjury of juries render it inoperative.

The common sentiment of Christendom has, however, ratified the judgment which the Christian teachers pronounced upon the act, though it has somewhat modified the severity of the old censure, and has abandoned some of the old arguments. It was reserved for Madame de Staël, who, in a youthful work upon the Passions, had commended suicide, to reconstruct this department of ethics, which had been somewhat disturbed by the Revolution, and she did so in a little treatise which is a model of calm, candid, and philosophic piety. Frankly abandoning the old theological notions that the deed is of the nature of murder, that it is the worst of crimes, and that it is always, or even generally, the offspring of cowardice; abandoning, too, all attempts to scare men by religious terrorism, she proceeded, not so much to meet in detail the isolated arguments of its defenders, as to sketch the ideal of a truly virtuous man, and to show how such a character would secure men against all temptation to suicide. In pages of the most tender beauty, she traced the influence of suffering in softening, purifying, and deepening the character, and showed how a frame of habitual and submissive resignation was not only the highest duty, but also the source of the purest consolation, and at the same time the appointed condition of moral amelioration. Having examined in detail the Biblical aspect of the question, she proceeded to show how the true measure of the dignity of man is his unselfishness. She contrasted the martyr with the suicide the death which spring from devotion to duty with the death that springs from rebellion against circumstances. The suicide of Cato, which had been absurdly denounced by a crowd of ecclesiastics as an act of cowardice, and as absurdly alleged by many suicides as a justification for flying from pain or poverty, she represented as an act of martyrdom-a death like that of

Curtius, accepted nobly for the benefit of Rome.

The eye

of the good man should be for ever fixed upon the interest of others. For them he should be prepared to relinquish life with all its blessings. For them he should be prepared to tolerate life, even when it seemed to him a curse.

Sentiments of this kind have, through the influence of Christianity, thoroughly pervaded European society, and suicide, in modern times, is almost always found to have sprung either from absolute insanity; from diseases which, though not amounting to insanity, are yet sufficient to discolour our judgments; or from that last excess of sorrow, when resignation and hope are both extinct. Considering it in this light, I know few things more fitted to qualify the optimism we so often hear than the fact that statistics show it to be rapidly increasing, and to be peculiarly characteristic of those nations which rank most high in intellectual development and in general civilisation. In one or two countries, strong religious feeling has counteracted the tendency; but the comparison of town and country, of different countries, of different provinces of the same country, and of different periods in history, proves conclusively its reality. Many reasons may be alleged to explain it. Mental occupations are peculiarly fitted to produce insanity, and the blaze of publicity, which in modern time encircles an act of suicide, to draw weak minds to its imitation. If we put the condition of absolutely savage life, out of our calculation, it is probable that a highly developed civilisation, while it raises the average of well-being, is accompanied by more extreme misery and acute sufferings

This fact has been often noticed. The reader may find many statistics on the subject in Lisle, Du Suicide, and Winslow's Anatomy of Suicide.

2 There seems good reason to believe, that with the progress of mental development through the

ages, there is, as in the case with other forms of organic development, a correlative degeneration going on, and that an increase of insanity is a penalty which an increase of our present civilisation necessarily pays.' Maudsley's Physiology of Mind, p. 201.

Nomadic

than the simpler stages that had preceded it. habits, the vast agglomeration of men in cities, the pressure of a fierce competition, and the sudden fluctuations to which manufactures are peculiarly liable, are the conditions of great prosperity, but also the causes of the most profound misery. Civilisation makes many of what once were superfluities, necessaries of life, so that their loss inflicts a pang long after their possession had ceased to be a pleasure. It also, by softening the character, renders it peculiarly sensitive to pain, and it brings with it a long train of antipathies, passions, and diseased imaginations, which rarely or never cross the thoughts or torture the nerves of the simple peasant. The advance of religious scepticism, and the relaxation of religious discipline, have weakened and sometimes destroyed the horror of suicide; and the habits of self-assertion, the eager and restless ambitions which political liberty, intellectual activity, and manufacturing enterprise, all in their different ways conspire to foster, while they are the very principles and conditions of the progress of our age, render the virtue of content in all its forms extremely rare, and are peculiarly unpropitious to the formation of that spirit of humble and submissive resignation which alone can mitigate the agony of hopeless suffering.

From examining the effect of Christianity in promoting a sense of the sanctity of human life, we may now pass to an adjoining field, and examine its influence in promoting a fraternal and philanthropic sentiment among mankind. And first of all we may notice its effects upon slavery.

The reader will remember the general position this institution occupied in the eyes of the Stoic moralists, and under the legislation which they had in a great measure inspired. The legitimacy of slavery was fully recognised; but Seneca and other moralists had asserted, in the very strongest terms,, the natural equality of mankind, the superficial character of

the differences between the slave and his master, and the duty of the most scrupulous humanity to the former. Instances of a very warm sympathy between master and slave were of frequent occurrence; but they may unfortunately be paralleled by not a few examples of the most atrocious cruelty. To guard against such cruelty, a long series of enactments, based avowedly upon the Stoical principle of the essential equality of mankind, had been made under Hadrian, the Antonines, and Alexander Severus. Not to recapitulate at length what has been mentioned in a former chapter, it is sufficient to remind the reader that the right of life and death had been definitely withdrawn from the master, and that the murder of a slave was stigmatised and punished by the law. It had, however, been laid down, by the great lawyer Paul, that homicide implies an intention to kill, and that therefore the master was not guilty of that crime if his slave died under chastisement which was not administered with this intention. But the licence of punishment which this decision might give was checked by laws which forbade excessive cruelty to slaves, provided that, when it was proved, they should be sold to another master, suppressed the private prisons in which they had been immured, and appointed special officers to receive their complaints.

In the field of legislation, for about two hundred years after the conversion of Constantine, the progress was extremely slight. The Christian emperors, in A.D. 319 and 326, adverted in two elaborate laws to the subject of the murder of slaves,' but, beyond reiterating in very emphatic terms the previous enactments, it is not easy to see in what way they improved the condition of the class. They pro

1 Cod. Theod. lib. ix. tit. 12. 2 Some commentators imagine (see Muratori, Antich. Ital. Diss. xiv.) that among the Pagans the murder of a man's own slave was only assimilated to the crime of

murdering the slave of another man, while in the Christian law it was defined as homicide, equivalent to the murder of a freeman. I confess, however, this point does not appear to me at all clear.

1

vided that any master who applied to his slave certain atrocious tortures, that are enumerated, with the object of killing him, should be deemed a homicide, but if the slave died under moderate punishment, or under any punishment not intended to kill him, the master should be blameless; no charge whatever, it was emphatically said, should be brought against him. It has been supposed, though I think without evidence, by commentators that this law accorded immunity to the master only when the slave perished under the application of appropriate' or servile punishments--that is to say, scourging, irons, or imprisonment; but the use of torture not intended to kill was in no degree restricted, nor is there anything in the law to make it appear either that the master was liable to punishment, if contrary to his intention his slave succumbed beneath torture, or that Constantine proposed any penalty for excessive cruelty which did not result in death. It is, perhaps, not out of place to observe, that this law was in remarkable harmony with the well-known article of the Jewish code, which provided that if a slave, wounded to death by his master, linger for a day or two, the master should not be punished, for the slave was his money.2

The two features that were most revolting in the slave system, as it passed from the Pagan to the Christian emperors, were the absolute want of legal recognition of slave marriage, and the licence of torturing still conceded to the master. The Christian emperors before Justinian took no serious steps to remedy either of these evils, and the measures that were taken against adultery still continued inapplicable to slave unions, because the vileness of their condition makes them unworthy of the observation of the law.'3 The abolition of the punish ent of crucifixion had, however, a special

1 See Godefroy's Commentary on these laws.

2 Exodus xxi. 21. 36 'Quas vilitates vitæ dignas legum observatione non credidit.'

Cod. Theod. lib. ix. tit. 7. See on this law, Wallon, tome iii. pp. 417,

418.

Dean Milman observes. In the old Roman society in the Eastern