If the debtor has handed over wife, son, or daughter as hostage, they have to be treated as freemen still. They are not to forfeit freedom for ever. The Code orders their release at the end of three years’ service. It is a noteworthy interference with the above power of a man over his family (§ 116), Semitic or not. In such cases as these there is no account whatever taken of the amount of debt. It is an arbitrary interference on the part of a lawgiver with commercial principles, or selfish instinct, in favour of the weak against the strong. It seems clearly to be an innovation, for though earlier kings had declared amnesty from debt on special occasions, that was a more primitive measure of pity and a generous use of other men’s money peculiarly unfair to the soft-hearted lender. This was a bold, calculated move in the direction of humane regulation. It had its risks of abuse, and if Hammurabi had stopped there, he might have done more harm than good. For he would have left it open to the hard-hearted creditor to try and exact more work, the utmost farthing in fact, out of his temporary slave. Accordingly he declared that if the hostage for debt died of blows or want in the creditor’s house, the creditor should suffer the same family bereavement as he had brought on the debtor by his cruelty, a regulation which might lead the creditor’s family to moderate his exactions, or forfeit the average price of the slave he killed by ill use, and, what the creditor would feel most keenly of all, lose all further claim on the debtor. Now by such regulations Hammurabi set a very effective limit on two markedly Oriental vices. Men love to gamble by borrowing for present enjoyment on security of some contingent future wealth. They pledge crops, land, houses, family with gleeful irresponsibility. But others are avaricious and only too willing to lend on decent security or even most speculative future profit. Hammurabi’s Amorites and Babylonians were by no means above these abuses. He forbade speculation in crops, &c., and by his regulations on these points put a very stringent restraint on debt. The debtor’s powers of borrowing were greatly narrowed. A prudent lender found himself checked by the consideration that if the debtor did not pay he would never be able to reclaim more than three years’ average work out of the debtor, his wife, son, or daughter. He would have a shrewd guess at what these assets were worth. So the lawgiver cut at the root of much of the misery which his predecessors tried to redress by their slap-dash amnesty. We do well to remember that a respectable, pious, poor man in Babylonia could usually borrow from his local temple without interest, and that by the Code agricultural loans could not be pressed if the crop failed. Hence we see that most of the debts which Hammurabi made so difficult must have been due to improvidence, laziness, or a weak use of the facility to borrow offered by wealthy, lazy, and avaricious money-lenders.