The session of the State assembly which met in November, 1792, only attempted to carry out the constitutional provision prohibiting commercial transactions with slaves. No person was permitted to buy of, or sell to, any slave, any manner of thing whatsoever without a written permit descriptive of the article under the penalty of four times the value of the thing bought or sold. The jurisdiction of such cases was given to the county court, if they concerned values of more than five pounds. The slave was to receive ten lashes, which by the standards of those days was a meager punishment for any offense.[287] Whenever possible the slave was not brought into consideration as an offender. The theory seems to have been that the slave was better off when left alone. It was only when some unscrupulous outsider came in to use the slave either as a victim or as an object of profit that it was necessary to draw the strings tighter on the Negro, not because of any inherent tendency to crime so much as to keep the slave from becoming unruly when in the power of a superior influence. It was not until the session of 1798 that the legislature drew up the fundamental slave code which was to carry out all the recommendations of the constitutional convention and which remained the basis of all legal action throughout the entire period of slavery. Among the early acts of the State had been the temporary adoption of the statutes of Virginia on the treatment of slaves and slavery problems, which were then in force.[288] These remained as a slave code for Kentucky until the enactment in 1798 of these new laws, which contained forty-three articles and involved almost every question that could come up for legal consideration in connection with the institution. The experience of six years as a separate State had served to show that many existing provisions of the Virginia code were not readily adapted to the rapidly growing State, and then too there was a decided tendency to ameliorate the condition of the slave as much as possible. In Kentucky they were not then, at least, confronted with such a large mass of slaves that they could not meet problems in a much easier manner than in the Old Dominion.