Take the case of Hagar. We read, Gen. 16:1, she was an Egyptian "handmaid, maid-servant," perhaps one of those referred to in Gen. 12:16. Abraham, at Sarah's instigation, makes her his concubine. The usual bickering of Eastern harems ensues. Hagar leaves the tribe, is sent back by the angel, Ishmael is born, and this son of a slave (?) is regarded not only as free, but heir of the house of Abraham. Years pass, and the wild, reckless Ishmael is seen ridiculing Isaac, his puny brother and coheir. At the sight, all the mother and the aristocrat again rise up in Sarah, and she cries out to Abraham, "Cast out this bondwoman and her son, for he shall not be heir with my son, even Isaac;" and Abraham, so far from regarding them as chattels personal, and selling them south, sends off the wild boy to be the wild, free Arab, "whose hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against his." Take the case of Bilhah and Zilpah, given by Laban (Gen. 29:24, 29,) as handmaids (אָמָה) to his daughters Leah and Rachel. Gen. 30:4-14. They become Jacob's concubines, and bear him four sons--Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. Here the case is plain; the mothers are "servants," they have children, and these, instead of being (as in similar cases daily at the South) "reputed and adjudged in law to be chattels personal," are recognized as free and equal with the other sons, Reuben, Judah, &c., and become, like them, heads of tribes in Israel. In these cases,--and they are all which relate to the point at issue,--either the status of these servants _did_ or _did not_ decide that of their children. If it _did_, then, by the laws of chattelism, the children being free prove the mother (though servant) to be free; if it _did not_, then the mother was held only by feudal allegiance, while the children were always free. In either case the conditions of chattelism did not exist; they were not slaves, but free persons in the same condition as members of wandering Arab and Tartar tribes to this day.