"Thou at his day thou shalt crimes either openly permitted or practically connived at by other and later systems; he provided for the protection of the poor and the outcast. "Thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress him; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt."* "Ye shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child." shalt not oppress an hired servant; give him his hire; neither shall the sun go down upon it, for he is poor." "Thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and stranger."§ Such precepts as these, scattered through the statutes, prove that Moses remembered, what the Church and the State have ever been prone to forget, that humanity is a part of religion, and that the rights of the poorest peasant are as sacred before a just law as those of the noble or the king. Three thousand years later the framers of our Declaration of Independence declared the equality and liberty of the people to be self-evident truths. These American axioms Moses recognized and incorporated in the Hebraic Constitution. The assertion that all men are created equal would have been received only with derision by the nations of the earth. Every people were divided into classes by gulfs as broad as that which separates Dives and Lazarus, such that no man could pass. Moses forbade all caste and class distinctions: "Thou shalt not respect persons." "Ye shall have one manner of law as well for the stranger as for one of your own country."¶ "Thou shalt not *** honor the person of the mighty."** Such were his repeated commands. He recognized the unity of the people, and addressed them in the name of their God as one. "I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt." And he declared that Jehovah himself regarded not rank, nor wealth, nor birth. "For the Lord your God **** regardeth not * Exod. xxii., 21. Lev. xxiv., 22. + Ibid., xxii., 22. || Deut. i., 17; xvi., 19. Deut. xxiv., 14. ++ Exod. xx., 2. persons, nor taketh reward."*. Nothing analogous to an hereditary aristocracy existed under his administration; and although a priestly order was established, it was, as we shall presently see, deprived of all priestly power, and it was emphatically declared that the whole people were a nation of priests unto God, whose ear was equally open to the prayers of all. No less radical would have been the assertion that govern ments instituted among men derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. All Oriental nations were absolute despotisms. The people were the slaves of irresponsible autocrats. Moses established the Hebrew commonwealth, by God's direction, as a free republic, upon universal, or at least popular suffrage. He submitted all questions to the action of the people. All officers were elected by their voice. The Constitution which he proposed was received and ratified by their vote. And even God himself was accepted as their supreme civil ruler by the independent voice of the great assembly. But, while thus all questions were submitted to the voice. of the people, the Hebrew commonwealth was not a pure democracy. Six hundred years later, in Sparta, all public questions were submitted to the people in mass meeting. * Deut. x., 17. + Exod. xix., 6. When the people first reached Mount Sinai, they were assembled by Moses, and God said to them, "If ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people." "And Moses came and called for all the elders of the people, and laid before their faces all these words which the Lord commanded him. And all the people answered together, and said, 'All that the Lord hath spoken we will do.'"-Exod. xix., 5, 7, 8. When, thereupon, their Constitution, the ten commandments, was propounded, this again was submitted to them for ratification: "And Moses came and told all the people all the words of the Lord, and all the judgments; and all the people answered with one voice, and said, 'All the words which the Lord hath said will we do." "-Exod. xxiv., 3. And although the account in Numbers, chap. xi., 16, 24, uninterpreted, might be thought to indicate that the officers were chosen by Moses, he himself bears testimony that the people elected their own officers, and he merely inducted them into office.-Deut. i., 13-18. The attempt proved an utter failure. In a convocation so large deliberation was not possible; debate, therefore, was not allowed. Passion, prejudice, and ignorance were the enactors of the laws. Moses established the first representative government on earth. He constituted two representative assemblies. The first is known as the Great Congregation. It was the Jewish House of Representatives. It reflected the popular will. It was the Great Congregation that, on the report of the twelve spies, voted not to attempt the subjugation of Canaan.* It was before the Great Congregation that Joshua was inducted into office. It was the Great Congregation that ratified the selection of Saul as king. When Solomon wished to establish the ark of the Lord at Jerusalem, it was to the Great Congregation that he submitted the proposition, and by them it was ratified and carried into effect.§ The other body consisted of seventy men selected from the different tribes, Moses's chief counselors. This body made treaties, tried capital offenses, and enforced the execution of the laws.** It was Cabinet, Senate, and Supreme Court. Although Moses thus provided popular government, assured by prophetic vision that the popular mind would not long be able to resist the dazzling enticements of royalty, he provided a careful system of checks and restraints in case a monarchy should be established. These are recorded in the seventeenth chapter of Deuteronomy.tt No foreigħer should receive the imperial crown. The king should establish no cavalry. He should lay no heavy taxation to enrich himself and his court. He should not establish a harem. And he should be himself subject to the laws of the realm. These he should make his constant study. In brief, Moses so guard *Numb. xiv., 1-5, 10. 1 Chron. xiii., 1-8. || Numb. xi., 16, 17. Numb. xxvii., 18-23. § 1 Kings viii., 1–5. In the singular story of the inhabitants of Gibeon, the congregation were dissatisfied with the treaty, but sustained it because made by the Senate.Josh. ix., 18-21. ** Jer. xxvi., 10-16. †† Deut. xvii., 14-20. ed the royal power and prerogatives that, in the later and corrupt period of its history, so profligate a despot as Ahab was able to accomplish so simple an act of despotism as the unjust absorption of a poor peasant's estate only by bribing the regularly constituted judges of the land.* Prior to Moses's day, law was, in general, little more than the will of a single despot. He established a carefully constructed system of legislation. The laws which he propounded were equally binding on the highest and the lowest. -the chief magistrate and the meanest subject-the priest and the people. Some of these laws, tested by the demands. of modern society, have been thought cruel, others frivolous. But if the value of a law is to be measured by its adaptation to the people and the times, they are obnoxious to neither charge. He permitted slavery, which it would have been in vain to forbid. But he placed it under such restrictions that at the time of Christ it had utterly disappeared. He allowed divorce and polygamy. But he so provided for the protection of woman, that in this semi-barbaric people her condition was immeasurably above what it ever was in the highest civilization of Greece or Rome. He affixed penalties which, for the nineteenth century, would be unnecessarily severe. But, at a time when families were always held responsible for the act of their head, he forbade attainder; and in an age and a nation without jails or penitentiaries, and when, therefore, imprisonment for crime was impracticable, he provided capital punishment for but twelve crimes,‡ while as late as A.D. 1600 two hundred and sixty-three were punished with death in England. At the same time he carefully guarded human life, liberty, and property;§ he made special provisions for the detection of secret crime; he established cities of refuge, in which the perpetrator of an accidental homicide might escape from the natural but unjust * 1 Kings xxi., 1-16. Deut. xxiv., 16. See a list of them in Smith's Bible Dict., art. Laws of Moses. § See Exod. xx., 13; Deut. xxii., 8; Exod. xxii., 1-14; Deut. xxiv., 7; and ante, p. 29 and 30, and notes. | Deut. xxi., 1-9. revenge of the next of kin ;* he compelled speedy payment of wages to the day-laborer; he provided public charities for the stranger and the poor. These provisions have absolutely no parallel in any ancient legislation. Laws are useless forms without measures for their enforcement. Moses arranged a judiciary§ who were elected by the people themselves,|| but, apparently holding their office for life, were not subject to popular passion and caprice; and he framed a system of courts whose nature, but dimly shadowed forth in the records which have come down to us, seem to indicate a carefully arranged system of inferior and appellate courts, rising from a magistrate answering to our justice of the peace, whose jurisdiction was purely local; to a Council of Seventy, which answered to our Supreme Court of the United States. T How to preserve local independence, and yet secure national unity and strength, has been a perplexing political problem in all ages. At an era when governments were either centralized despotisms, like those of Persia and Egypt, or disintegrated and perpetually warring tribes, like those of the Canaanitish clans-like those maintained to the present day among the Bedouin Arabs and the remnant of North American Indians, Moses gave to this people a government whose motto might well have been E Pluribus Unum. He recognized the tribal divisions already introduced;** he provided for their local organization. By his direction independent territory was allotted to them, with well-marked bounds.†† Their right to elect their own local officers, legislative, executive, and judicial, was recognized and maintained. At the same time, he merged them in one nation; he instructed them in the truth that their God was one; he provided one worship, ritual, and tabernacle. Later was established one * Numb. xxxv., 9-28; Deut. iv., 41-43. + Deut. xxiv., Lev. xix., 9, 10; Deut. xxiv., 19-22; xxiii., 24, 25; xiv., 27-29. ¶ Exod. xviii., 21-25; Numb. xi., 24. †† Josh. xiii., xiv., 1-5. § Exod. xviii. ** Numb. i. | Deut. i., 13. 15. |