Slavery, says Hargrave, always imports an obligation of perpetual service, which only the consent of the master can dissolve: it also generally gives to the master an arbitrary power of administring every sort of correction, however inhuman, not immediately affecting life or limb, and even these in some countries, as formerly in Rome, and at this day among the Asiatics and Africans, are left exposed to the arbitrary will of a master, or protected only by fines or other slight punishments. The property of the slave also is absolutely the property of his master, the slave himself being the subject of property, and as such saleable, or transmissible at the will of his master.--A slavery, so malignant as that described, does not leave to its wretched victims the least vestige of any civil right, and even divests them of all their natural rights. It does not, however, appear, that the rigours of slavery in this country were ever as great, as those above described: yet it must be confessed, that, at times, they have fallen very little short of them. The first severe law respecting slaves, now to be met with in our code, is that of 1669, already mentioned, which declared that the death of a slave _resisting_ his master, or other person correcting him by his order, _happening by extremity of the correction_, should not be accounted felony. The alterations which this law underwent in three successive acts [1705. c. 49. 1723, c. 4. 1748. c. 31.], were by no means calculated effectually to mitigate its severity; it seems rather to have been augmented by the act of 1723, which declared that a person indicted for the murder of a slave, and found guilty of _manslaughter_, should not incur any punishment for the same.[16] [Footnote 16: In December term 1788, one John Huston was tried in the general court for the murder of a slave; the jury found him guilty of manslaughter, and the court, upon a motion in arrest of judgment, discharged him without any punishment. The general assembly being then sitting, some of the members of the court mentioned the case to some leading characters in the legislature, and the act was at the same session repealed.]