MISCELLANEOUS NOTES 743
also involves loss of freedom. But this is not the sense in which the word is used in law, and to avoid arguing at cross purpose, it would be better to base the comparison on the legal meaning of the word slavery.
In layman’s language, a person is said to be slave when he is the property of another. This definition is perhaps too terse for the lay reader. He may not understand the full import of it without further explanation. Property means something, a term which is used to denote a bundle of rights which a person has over something which is his property, such as the right to possess, to use, to claim the benefit of, to transfer by way of sale, mortgage or lease and destroy. Ownership therefore means complete dominion over property. To put it concretely, when it is said that the slave is the property of the master, what it means is that the master can make the slave work against his will, take the benefit of whatever the slave produces without the consent of the slave. The master can lease out, sell or mortgage his slave without consulting the wishes of the slave and the master can even kill him in the strictest legal connotation of the term. In the eye of the law the slave is just a material object with which his master may deal in any way he likes.
In the light of this legal definition, slavery does appear to be worse than untouchability. A slave can be sold, mortgaged or leased ; an untouchable cannot be sold, mortgaged or leased. A slave can be killed by the master without being held guilty for murder ; an untouchable cannot be. Whoever causes his death will be liable for murder. In fact, the slave could not be killed with impunity, the law did recognize his death as being culpable homicide as it did in the case of the death of a freeman. But taking the position of the slave as prescribed by laws the difference between the condition of the slave and the untouchable is undoubtedly clear-that the slave was worse off than the untouchable.
There is however another way of defining a slave which is equally legal and precise although it is not the usual way. This other way of defining a slave is this : A slave is a human being who is not a person in the eye of the law. This way of defining a slave may perhaps puzzle some. It may therefore be necessary to state that in the eye of the law the term person is identical with the term human being. In law, there may be human beings whom the law does not regard as persons. Contrariwise there are in law persons