Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/24

 sentiment of the Colony in the closing years of the previous century, a sentiment that so far as the servants were concerned was even more enlightened than it had been forty years before, we find all the details of the original statute reenacted, with some additional provisions which made the regulations on this point still more effective. No master, for instance, was to be permitted to whip a white servant on the naked back without special authority from the court, and in case this order was disregarded, he was to be mulcted twenty shillings. The justices of the peace were, as formerly, to receive the complaints of all persons under articles of indenture as to unwholesome food, inferior clothing, and uncomfortable lodging. If there was good reason to suspect that a justice, the justices being generally large landowners, and, therefore, naturally disposed to sympathize with the master rather than with the servant, leaned in any case towards the former without adequate cause, the servant could enter a petition in the county court without the usual delay of a formal process of action.

From this it will be seen that the laborers of Virginia, whether bound by indenture or by the custom of the country, were shielded by laws that recognized the fallibility and selfishness of the local magistrates and provided a remedy as swift and as summary as if a landowner and not a servant had been involved. Under the code of 1705, which, as already stated, reflected the state of public feeling at the close of the seventeenth century as well as at the beginning of the eighteenth, if the servant became disabled in consequence of the meagreness of the provisions made for his comfort, or as the result of the punishment to which he might have been subjected on any occasion, he was to be taken away from his master,