Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/778

 748 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

idea is found among many peoples, as, for example, the ancient Mexicans, who practically confined all sales to public market- places, as it was deemed suspicious to make bargains anywhere else. 1

The resort to the purgation oath, so frequently employed in the code, was, together with the compurgation, a common practice in early English legal procedure, and in the modified form of affidavit persists as an important principle. If one may safely reason from the code itself, the ordeal played in England a more important part than in Babylon. This appeal in the case of alleged sorcery (Ham., 2) finds an analogy in an English case in which, in 1209, " one woman appealed another of sorcery in the king's court ; the accused purged herself by the ordeal of iron." 2

The solicitude for the protection of property disclosed in the code might easily be duplicated from modern legislation. One phase of this conservatism finds a significant expression in the severe penalties visited upon those who aid in the escape of slaves (Ham., 15-20). These provisions recall the fugitive- slave laws of the ante-bellum days in the United States, as well as similar enactments in the Roman codes. The provision requiring the lessee of a field who neglects to raise a crop (Ham., 42) to pay the owner grain on the basis of the average yield in the neighborhood, is almost exactly duplicated by a Hindu law which in the same circumstances compels a tenant "to pay the owner of the land the value of the crop that ought to have grown." 3 The law of Hammurabi which held the governor and city responsible for losses through highway robbery within the limits of the district ( 23) was also the rule in the English Hundred in the time of Edward I. 4 This prin-

1 SPENCER, Descriptive Sociology, Div. II, No. 2.

" POLLOCK AND MAITLAND, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 39.

^Sacred Books of the East, Vol. II, Part I, p. 168.

" . . . . upon the hundred wherein a man is robbed which is meant to oblige the hundredors to make hue and cry after the felon ; for if they take him they stand excused. But otherwise the party robbed is entitled to prosecute them by a special action on the case for damages equivalent to his loss." BLACKSTONE, Commentaries, Vol. Ill, p. 1 60.
 * Of the same sort is the forfeiture inflicted by the statute of Winchester :