THE THEORY OP JlfRTSPRUDENCE. 



25 



requested to speak, namely, the laws of Babylon. I am afraid I 

 cannot analyse them in the same way as Mr. Corrie did those of the 

 Old Testament ; and after the excellent comments which we have 

 heard, what I have to add to the discussion will probably fall very 

 short of its high level hitherto. These laws — the Code of Hammurabi 

 — are very difficult to treat of, and one can only say, that they 

 show what a remarkable book of Babylonian law has been made 

 since the time of the earliest code — for there must have been one 

 before that of Hammurabi, as the tablets giving exercises for those 

 studying to be scribes show. One of the speakers has said that 

 law is another name for Right ; but the laws of Babylon, both those 

 which go back to the earlier period, and the later codes, show one 

 thing, namely, that there was no personal right ; or, at least, that 

 the personal right of liberty of action was invested in the freemen 

 of Babylonia. There was a large class of serfs, who, though not 

 slaves, apparently had no real liberty of action. They seem to have 

 been obliged to work in various ways, and to toil on the farms, 

 though they possessed property, and were not really slaves, whose 

 position showed a very noteworthy difference. 



One of the precepts of the Old Testament is, " an eye for an eye, 

 and a tooth for a tooth," and this has its parallel in Babylonian law 

 as exhibited by the Code of Hammurabi. That a man should be 

 made to suffer as he had made another suffer, seems natural ; but to 

 my mind it is hardly a practical thing, for to mutilate a man because 

 he had mutilated another was simply to make two defective members 

 of society instead of one — other means of punishing him without 

 impairing his usefulness might easily have been found. In this 

 matter of mutilations, there is a point concerning the old Babylonian 

 contracts which struck me, and therefrom one gathers that the laws 

 were sometimes regarded as not quite sufficient. According to the 

 translation of a Babylonian contract made by a German Assyriologist 

 Dr. Ungnad, one of the parties, in a certain contingency, agrees to 

 submit to mutilation, or something similar, of a more severe 

 character than that exacted by the law referring thereto. This 

 shows the nature of social state of the Babylonians, and suggests, 

 also, that the laws by which they set so much store were not always 

 observed ; and that something was left to the contracting parties in 

 such a case as this. And this leads to the question of imprisonment. 

 A man awaiting trial or punishment would naturally have to be 



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