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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ment, no indictment was tried until after tlie expiration of the year 

 and a day within which an appeal of felony might be instituted. This 

 remained the practice until third Henry VII., when, in order to avoid 

 these delays, it was enacted that acquittal on trial of an indictment 

 should be no bar to an appeal of felony for the same offense. In 

 the legislation of some countries, the conflict with reference to blood- 

 avengement between the dictates of public policy on the one hand and 

 the prevalent passions and notions of honor on the other was produc- 

 tive of a laughable incongruity. The law of Gottland, while making 

 express provision for the appearance of the wrong-doer in court under 

 safeguard, in order that he might offer the prosecutor a price in atone- 

 ment of his offense, at the same time declared the prosecutor who ac- 

 cepted it at the first offer, even after the expiration of a year, to be a 

 shameless person. 



The tenacity with which the avenger adhered to his right of re- 

 dress and the difficulty of controlling him in the exercise of this right 

 are further attested by the character of the expedients by which it was 

 sought to fortify measures aiming at his restraint. Thus Moses, 

 though the Isi'aelites were in his day quite familiar with the public 

 prosecution of crimes, some of which were entirely withdrawn from 

 the domain of private retaliation, found it still necessary to recognize 

 the blood-avenger's right personally to pursue and slay without form 

 of law the willful murderer : " The avenger of the blood shall slay the 

 murderer ; when he meeteth him he shall slay him." 



But, as under most primitive codes of honor, so among the early 

 Israelites the principle of blood-avengement was so malignant as to 

 require retaliation even against the involuntary man-slayer. The in- 

 strument of death, whether man or beast, the avenger was in honor 

 equally bound to destroy, without reference to the malicious or acci- 

 dental character of the homicidal act. The flagrant injustice of pun- 

 ishing with death involuntary acts void of moral guilt, was in the 

 Mosaic age, probably as manifest to large numbers of the Israelites as 

 to Moses himself ; yet so deeply rooted was the practice in the tra- 

 ditions of the people that the great law-giver dismissed as impractica- 

 ble the idea of abolishing it. His scheme for ameliorating the hard- 

 ships of both the willful murderer and the involuntary homicide by 

 the designation of cities of refuge within the limits or vicinity of which 

 they could find protection from the avenger, the former until he should 

 have opportunity to prove his innocence, and the latter until the occur- 

 rence of some event with which his final discharge from liability could 

 be plausibly linked, bears witness upon its face to the difficulty he an- 

 ticipated in its enforcement. That his plan might be fortified by re- 

 ligious reverence and sacred associations, he provided for the selection 

 of the cities of refuge from among the cities of the Levites, and dated 

 the freedom of the excusable homicide from the death of the high 

 priest. It is likely that among all early races the right of sanctuary 



