86 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
endure what was left to them of life. The first months of employment were known as the period of “seasoning” and during it no less on an average of one third of the novices failed to adjust themselves in body or spirit to the new conditions of climate or food or labour and died. Taking all the deaths together—in the slave-catching wars or raids, on the march to the sea, during the “Middle Passage” and in “seasoning”—it has been moderately reckoned that for every African Negro who became “seasoned” at least one other Negro was killed.
Thirdly as to the actual conditions of life which a “seasoned “Negro slave had to undergo. The Negro slavery gave the Master two rights which were indisputably established, the right to own and the right to punish. The right to own was given a wide meaning. By virtue of it the Master had not merely a right to the services of the Negro as a servant, but he had also the right to sell those services, to transmit by inheritance and to alienate them in any way he liked. The effect of this conception of the right was “to completely confound and identify the person of the slave with the thing owned.” The conception of the slave as property made the Negro liable to be seized in payment of his master’s debts. Even after such slaves had been emancipated they were still liable to seizure for the payment of debts contracted prior to their emancipation. The conception of a slave as property rather than as person added further disability to the legal or civil status. He could neither own nor enjoy property in his own right. This was unlike the Roman Law which did allow the slaves to own property which was called peculium. It was a limited right but it was still an important right because it shows that the Roman Law did recognize that a slave though property was also a person. Not being a person a Negro as a slave could neither engage in trade nor marry. The right of the Master to punish a slave was also given a very cruel interpretation in its application to the Negro. In a case which arose in the state of North Carolina Court in 1829 the Cheif Justice in acquitting the Master who was indicted for beating his slave observed:
“It was a mistake to say that the relations of Master and slave were like those of parent and child. The object of the parent in training his son was to render him fit to live the life of a free man, and, as a means to that end, he gave him moral and intellectual instruction. With the case of the slave it was very different. There could be no sense in addressing moral considerations to a slave. The end of slavery is the profit of the Master, his security and public safety; the subject, one doomed in his own person and his posterity to live without knowledge and without capacity to make anything his own, and to toil that neither may reap the fruits. What moral