A little further along in the same instrument we find the Legislature delegated with authority to pass laws prohibitive of the introduction into the State of slaves "as merchandise." This apparently evidences the existence, even at that early date, of a spirit of opposition to the business of "slave trading" as a common vocation which easily accounts for the feeling with which the "nigger trader" was regarded by the better classes--those among whom he would look for purchasers of his goods. In this same clause the Legislature is empowered to pass laws to oblige the owner of slaves "to treat them with humanity," to provide for them necessary clothing and provisions, to abstain from all injuries to them extending to "life or limb," and, in case of the failure to comply with the directions of such laws, the slave might be sold to some more humane master. By this instrument it was also expressly provided that the Legislature should never have the power to deprive the slave of the right to an impartial trial by a jury. I think it proper that we should call to mind these provisions of our first organic law--testifying as they do to the treatment which law and society exacted of the master toward his slave;--but, while we can not fail to be impressed with the spirit of justice and humanity manifested in our early constitution, at a casual reading, some of the succeeding legislative enactments might be regarded as extremely harsh. But in considering laws of this nature, abhorrent as they may be to our present sense of humane propriety, we must not lose sight of the time in which they were effective, and our judgment must be tempered by a remembrance of the fact that they were operative in a state of society which, while no less refined or lower in its moral tone than our own, yet looked upon criminal laws from a view point radically different from that of today. The debtor's prison still existed in England,--the stocks and pillory were instruments of common use both here and there,--the public whipping post claimed its daily victims,--the rack and thumb-screw were still applied to refractory witnesses in some of the courts of the old world and there was not yet in all Christendom a country in which women had equal property rights with men,--which, by the way, Mississippi was the first community in the civilized world to confer, and she had not progressed thus far by some twenty odd years.