Moral law in Europe, during the Middle Ages and almost up to modern times, permitted, and even ordained, the punishment by horrible torture and death of those whose religious convictions differed from the teaching of the established church; and with its consent supposed witches were sent to the stake. In feudal times the most terrible and revolting of crimes was felony--that is, a breach of faith on the part of the vassal against his overlord--and no torture was too cruel as a punishment. Nobles, who had so delicate a sense of honour that for a wry look or the accidental touch of an elbow they would draw their swords, enunciated the principle: "the king's blood does not defile," and vied with each other in forcing their daughters upon the king as concubines. Until Wilberforce roused the English conscience at the end of the eighteenth century, and Schölcher did the same in France in the middle of the nineteenth, slavery was considered a state of affairs which a moral community could tolerate. The North American descendants of those Puritans whom no persecution and no martyrdom could prevent from leading a life consonant with the dictates of their conscience, did not scruple to exercise proprietary rights over human beings who, in the case of octoroons and even of quadroons, did not even differ from them in colour, supposing that difference of colour could be considered an excuse. The code, which began with the "Declaration of Rights," contained heavy penalties for those who helped a slave to escape. Men, whose uprightness no one could doubt, did not hesitate to set bloodhounds on the track of an escaped nigger, and four years of a bloody civil war were needed before refractory slave-owners were forced to acknowledge the immorality of forced labour.
These examples have been taken from the customs of civilized nations. Amongst races that have not attained the high degree of development to which the white man has risen, we meet with much more revolting deviations from the moral law obtaining among white men. Tribes are known in which the commandment, "Honour thy father and thy mother," is interpreted so, that the children kill and eat their parents as soon as the latter have attained a considerable age. The North American Indians, who had a well developed sense of honour, were capable of chivalrous feelings and kept their word with absolute loyalty, used to torture helpless prisoners and scalp their defeated enemies, even the women. Among the Dyaks, who are under Dutch rule and are familiar with the laws and customs of Christian Europe, a marriageable youth must first cut off a human being's head before he is allowed to wed. He need not overcome his victim in honourable combat; he may creep upon him surreptitiously, and even fall upon him in his sleep and murder him in cowardly fashion without danger to himself.