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REDEMPTION OF DEBTORS
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pawned can redeem, if they choose, the person or the body by paying off the debt with the interest, 33½ per cent. per annum, to the common rate. Great sacrifices and exertions are made by his family to redeem almost every debtor, and the family property is strained to its utmost on his or her behalf; but in the case of a witch it is different, no set of relatives wish to redeem a convicted witch, who, reduced by the authorities to a body, and that mostly in bits and badly damaged, is not a thing desirable. No! they say Society has got him and we are morally certain he must have been illegitimate, for such a thing as a witch never happened in our family before, and if we show the least interest in the remains we shall get accused ourselves. Of course if a man or woman's life is taken on any other kind of accusation save witchcraft, the affair is on a different footing. The family then forms a higher estimate of the deceased's value than they showed signs of to him or her when living, and they try to screw that value to the uttermost farthing out of the person who has killed their kinsman. Society at large only regards you for doing this as a fool man to think so highly of the departed, whose true value it knows to be far below that set on him. In the case of a living man taken for debt, he is a slave to his creditor, a pawn slave, but not on the same footing as a boughten slave; he has not the advantages of a true slave in the matter of succeeding to the wealth or position of the house, but against that he can be a free man the moment his debts are paid. This may be a theoretical possibility only, just as it would be theoretical for me to expect my family to bail me out if the bail were a question of a million sterling, but in legal principle the redemption is practicable.

In the case of taking a dead body another factor is