this government, when instead of their children receiving the promised education, they were transported, as they say, to other countries and sold as slaves”.[685] Massachusetts sought to control the custom of the Indians in apprenticing themselves and their children to the whites and the consequent abuse of the practice, by enacting, in 1700, a law requiring the consent of two or more justices of the peace to such a proceeding, so as to make sure that the terms of the agreement were reasonable. The justices of the regular courts were empowered to hear the complaint of an Indian with regard to any indenture or apprenticeship, and to settle the matter.[686] Similar acts were passed in 1718[687] and 1725.[688] The latter act provided a heavy fine for taking any children beyond the seas without due legal sanction, and further decreed that any indenture then existing of an adult Indian should be good for no longer than one year from the date of the passage of the law, except by legal approval as specified in the law. In 1763, another act, to continue as law for three years, was passed, forbidding any Marshpee Indian to bind out his or her child or children to any English person whatsoever by indenture or any other way, in satisfaction of or as security for a debt, without the consent of the major part of the overseers, and declaring that every indenture or any instrument whatever, or oral agreement whereby such child or children should be bound out contrary to the true intent and meaning of the act, should be adjudged null and void.[689] Rhode Island, also, for the same purpose of preventing the conversion of apprenticeship into actual slavery, passed an act, June 15, 1730, requiring the assent of two justices to any bond of apprenticeship to which the Indians were parties.[690] If the Indian captives disposed of for periods of years by Rhode Island at the close of King Philip’s War are to be considered as involuntary indentured servants, then such abuses as the law of 1730 were intended to remedy existed with reference to those captives. By the terms of their disposal they were to be free after a temporary period of service. But the colonists sometimes continued to hold them in servitude after the specified term had expired. Furthermore, though no provision for such action was made by the colonial government, the masters of these servants held as slaves the children born of these Indians while in servitude.[691]