Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/176

162 the two most enlightened states of antiquity, Athens and Rome. Solon even went further than Moses, and enacted that "whoever put out the only eye of a one-eyed man, should lose both his own." Is it said this is still pressing the claim of justice beyond the limits of humanity? I reply, the extreme severity of these punishments may have been the only means to restrain the outbreaks of passion and to prevent the acts which required such retribution.

It has been well observed that such a law could be enforced only where there was a general equality among the citizens. In the later days of Rome, when the spoils of many lands had enriched a few powerful families, this principle of strict retaliation was abolished, and fines substituted as a compensation for crime. But as the fine was no punishment to a Roman patrician, the law was no protection to the poor. The old Hebrew justice alone made all men equal. By that, the body of every man was sacred and inviolable. The hard hand of the laborer was as precious as the soft hand of the rich. The injured man might, indeed, take pecuniary indemnity. But he might refuse it, and insist on blood for blood. Certainly this was a stern law; but it afforded a powerful protection to the weak. No man dared to lay upon them the hand of violence.

The laws against murder followed the same inexorable rule — life for life — a law in which there was no element of pardon and pity. But Moses did not create it. It has been the law of the desert for thousands of years. When that old bearded Sheikh of all the Bedaween of Sinai, sitting under the shadow of a great rock in the desert, explained to us the operation of the lex talionis in his