gets usury from his offense and employment from his crime. Avarice rules in all their judgments; and the purse becomes the gallows of all crimes. Money is the vengeance of the aggrieved parties, and the sponge for injuries. When they are paid for, no spot or sign of the offense is left. Although there are crimes which bear especially a capital penalty, yet there is no penalty that cannot be redeemed by money or goods. He who has no possessions at all has still liberty, and can surrender that also. That is the road most traveled by which some come to be the slaves of others; and perhaps the chief, if he be poor, may be the slave of another who is a plebeian. When anyone is caught in adultery, if sudden wrath does not execute him, which is but seldom, the wounds are passed on to his purse, in the endeavor to destroy him, and the husband subjects his own wife to the same harshness and penalty. For here all persons have a separate purse, and the husband is not master of what his wife possesses but only of what pertains to him. Nor, under pretext of managing her possessions, does he have more to do with it than the extent of her permission; and she is always mistress of her own possessions. Thus she pays a fine to her own husband, as if she were a stranger to him. Having received this, the aggrieved party remains as satisfied as when, among the Spaniards, one sword has pinned both guilty ones together. The offender retains a privilege truly insulting and barbarous--that for one year he may have intercourse with the woman without her husband complaining. Then the husband and wife return in all peace to cohabit as before, the offense being again at risk, for another atonement. They especially abhor theft, and they have assigned an ignominious penalty for the thief, as a warning. This is to cut off the joints of his fingers, more or fewer according to the crime. That perhaps obliges them to pass from the hands to the toes, the penalty being proportioned to the misdeeds of greater atrocity. But that penalty can also be redeemed, as can the others, by money. Notwithstanding that, some crimes they regard as so capital that they do not respect petitions or allow bribes, and death is the necessary punishment for them. The unnatural crime is one of them, and the severity of the execution well shows their natural horror, for such people are burned, and their houses; and nothing that they possessed is allowed to escape from this rigor, as being contaminated. Or, having caged the offenders, they throw them into the sea, and destroy their houses and fields, by such punishment to make demonstration of their abhorrence.