Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/779

 THE LA WS OF HAMMURABI 749

ciple has been recognized in modern times, so far as property losses through riots are concerned. 1 But the demands of property-owners were not all-powerful in ancient Babylon. The poor and weak were afforded a measure of protection. Thus the code forbade, or rather punished by a heavy fine, the creditor who seized the ox a- necessity for agriculture -of his debtor (Ham., 241). This humane law has a counterpart in the biblical injunction against a creditor's keeping over night the cloak of the man who was in his debt ; 2 and something of the same idea of protection against the loss of the barest necessities finds expression in the modern laws which forbid or limit the garnisheeing of wages and guarantee to the bankrupt the retention of his homestead. Another significant section of the code (Ham., 177) declares null and void all sales of orphans' goods, together with forfeiture of the purchase money obviously a protective measure based upon the fundamental principles of the modern orphans' court.

The gradation of fines and damages for injuries to members of different social classes (Ham., 198 ff.) recall the same phenomena pointed out by Spencer: "with the rise of class distinctions in primitive Europe, the rates of compensation, equal among members of each class, had ceased to be equal among members of different classes." 3 The question might even be raised as to whether, with the existing principle of personal damages graded according to individual earning capa- city, every trace of the old idea of a tariff of social distinctions has wholly disappeared.

The lex talionis appears among all peoples in more or less disguised forms. Thus a Basuto whose son had been wounded in the head with a staff, in demanding the offender said : " With the same staff and in the same spot where my son was beaten will I give a blow on the head of the man who did it." 4 Among the nations influenced by Christianity the talio often appears not

1 Notably in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati in 1877; cf. WRIGHT, Industrial Evolu- tion of the United States, p. 306. a Exod. 22:26, 27. 3 Principles of Sociology, Vol. II, p. 53- SPENCER, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 528.