146 CEREMONIAL INSTITUTIONS. 



man, my house, my wife, my children belong to thce. 

 Around Delhi, if yon. ask an inferior kk k Whose horse is 

 that? he says Slave s, meaning his own; or he may say 

 k It is your highnesses , meaning that, being his, it is at 

 your disposal.&quot; In the Sandwich Islands a chief, asked re 

 specting the ownership of a house or canoe possessed by him, 

 replies &quot; It is yours and mine.&quot; In France, in the fif 

 teenth century, a complimentary speech made by an abbe on 

 his knees to the queen when visiting a monastery was 

 &quot; We resign and offer up the abbey with all that is in it, our 

 bodies, as our goods.&quot; And at the present time in Spain, 

 where politeness requires that anything admired by a visitor 

 shall be offered to him, &quot; the correct place of dating [a let 

 ter] from should be ... from this your house, wherever 

 it is; you must not say from this my house, as you mean to 

 place it at the disposition of your correspondent.&quot; 



But these modes of addressing a real or fictitious supe 

 rior, indirectly asserting subjection to him in body and 

 effects, are secondary in importance to the direct assertions 

 of slavery and servitude; which, beginning in barbarous 

 days, have persisted down to the present time. 



304. Hebrew narratives have familiarized us with the 

 word &quot; servant,&quot; as applied to himself by a subject or in 

 ferior, when speaking to a ruler or superior. In our days 

 of freedom, the associations established by daily habit have 

 obscured the fact that u servant &quot; as used in translations of 

 old records, means &quot; slave &quot; implies the condition fallen 

 into by a captiA e taken in war. Consequently when, as 

 often in the Bible, the phrases &quot; thy servant &quot; or &quot; thy 

 servants &quot; are uttered before a king, they must be taken to 

 signify that same state of subjugation which is more cir- 

 cuitously signified by the phrases quoted in the last sec 

 tion. Clearly this self-abasing word was employed, not by 

 attendants only, but by conquered peoples, and by sub 

 jects at large; as we see when the unknown David, ad- 



