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Chap, xliv] OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 531 this private prison, twelve ounces of rice were his daily food ; he might be bound with a chain of fifteen pounds weight ; and his misery was thrice exposed in the market-place to solicit the compassion of his friends and countrymen. At the expiration of thirty days, the debt was discharged by the loss of liberty or life; the insolvent debtor was either put to death or sold in foreign slavery beyond the Tiber ; but, if several creditors were alike obstinate and unrelenting, they might legally dismember his body, and satiate their revenge by this horrid partition. The advocates for this savage law have insisted that it must strongly operate in deterring idleness and fraud from contract- ing debts which they were unable to discharge ; but experience would dissipate this salutary terror, by proving that no creditor could be found to exact this unprofitable penalty of life or limb. As the manners of Rome were insensibly polished, the criminal code of the decemvirs was abolished by the humanity of accusers, witnesses, and judges ; and impunity became the consequence of immoderate rigour. The Porcian and Valerian laws pro- hibited the magistrates from inflicting on a free citizen any capital, or even corporal, punishment ; and the obsolete statutes of blood were artfully, and perhaps truly, ascribed to the spirit, not of patrician, but of regal, tyranny. In the absence of penal laws and the insufficiency of civil Abolition actions, the peace and justice of the city were imperfectly main- of penai tained by the private jurisdiction of the citizens. The male- factors who replenish our gaols are the outcasts of society, and the crimes for which they suffer may be commonly ascribed to ignorance, poverty, and brutal appetite. For the perpetration of similar enormities, a vile plebeian might claim and abuse the sacred character of a member of the republic ; but, on the proof or suspicion of guilt, the slave or the stranger was nailed to a cross, and this strict and summary justice might be exercised without restraint over the greatest part of the populace of Rome. Each family contained a domestic tribunal, which was not con- fined, like that of the prsetor, to the cognizance of external actions ; virtuous principles and habits were inculcated by the dis- cipline of education ; and the Roman father was accountable to the state for the manners of his children, since he disposed, with- out appeal, of their life, their liberty, and their inheritance. In some pressing emergencies, the citizen was authorised to avenge