"These Hebrew Statutes provide that the heathen might be purchased
and held as Slaves, and their posterity after them; that under
their Naturalization Laws all strangers and sojourners, Bond and
Free, have the privilege of acquiring the rights of citizenship;
that all Hebrews, natives or naturalized, might assert and maintain
their right to Freedom.

"At the end of six years a Hebrew Slave thus demanding his Liberty,
was not to be sent away empty; the owner, so far from claiming
compensation from his neighbors or from the Public Treasury for
setting him Free, was bound to divide with the Freedman, of his own
possessions: to give him of his flocks, of his herds, of his
granary, and of his winepress, of everything with which the Lord
Almighty had blessed the master during the years of his Servitude;
and then the owner was admonished that he was not to regard it as a
hardship to be required to Liberate the Slave, and to divide with
him of his substance.

"The Almighty places the Liberated Slave's claim to a division of
his former master's property on the eternal principles of Justice,
the duty to render an equivalent for an equivalent. The Slave
having served six years must be paid for his Service, must be paid
liberally because he had been worth even more than a hired servant
during the period of his enslavement.

"If, then," continued Mr. Harlan, "the justice of this claim cannot
be found either in Reason, Natural Justice, or the principles of
the Common Law, or in any positive Municipal or Statute regulation
of any State, or in the Hebrew Code written by the Finger of God
protruded from the flame of fire on the summit of Sinai, I ask