Here we are brought again to the Slave Code, under the shelter of which these things, and worse, are done with complete impunity. Listen to the remarkable words of Mr. Justice Ruffin, of North Carolina, who, in a solemn decision, thus portrays, affirms, and deplores this terrible latitude. The obedience of the slave, he says,-- “is the consequence only of _uncontrolled authority over the body.… The power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect._ I most freely confess my sense of the harshness of this proposition. I feel it as deeply as any man can. And, as a principle of moral right, every person in his retirement must repudiate it. But in the actual condition of things it must be so. There is no remedy. _This discipline belongs to the state of Slavery.…_ It is inherent in the relation of master and slave.”[65] This same license is thus expounded in a recent judicial decision of Virginia:-- “It is the policy of the law in respect to the relation of master and slave, and for the sake of securing proper subordination and obedience on the part of the slave, _to protect the master from prosecution, even if the whipping and punishment be malicious, cruel, and excessive_.”[66] Can Barbarism further go? Here is irresponsible power, rendered more irresponsible still by the seclusion of the plantation, and absolutely fortified by supplementary law excluding the testimony of slaves. That under its shelter enormities should occur, stranger than fiction, too terrible for imagination, and surpassing any attested experience, is simply according to the course of Nature and the course of history. Antiquity has illustrations which are most painful. From Ovid we learn how the porter was chained at his master’s gate;[67] by Plautus we are introduced to the various instruments of punishment, in fearful catalogue;[68] and in the pages of the philosopher Seneca we are saddened by the cruelties of which the slave was victim.[69] A later writer, the great teacher of medicine, Galen, describes men knocking out the teeth of slaves with the fist, falling upon them not only with fist, but with the heels, and gouging the eyes with a pen, if at hand, as did the Emperor Adrian on one occasion;[70] while Tacitus shows how four hundred slaves in the house of an assassinated master were handed over to vindictive death.[71] St. Chrysostom portrays a mistress dragging a slave-girl by the hair, and herself applying the whip, until the cries of her bruised victim filled the whole house and penetrated the street.[72]