the sons of the deceased prosecuted the statue for murder. The Thasians sank the statue in the sea, herein following the view taken by Draco, who, in the laws touching homicide which he drew up for the Athenians, enacted that even lifeless things should be banished if they fell on anybody and killed him.”69 As Dr. Frazer remarks, the punishment of inanimate objects for having accidentally been the cause of death was probably much older than Draco.70 At Athens there was a special tribunal for the purpose.71 Demosthenes states that, if a stone or a piece of wood or iron or any such thing fell and struck a man, and the person who threw the thing was not known, but the people knew, and were in possession of, the object which killed the man, that object was brought to trial at the court of the Prytaneum.72 Plato lays down the following rule in his ‘Laws’:—“If any lifeless thing deprive a man of life, except in the case of a thunderbolt or other fatal dart sent from the gods—whether a man is killed by lifeless objects falling upon him, or by his falling upon them, the nearest of kin shall appoint the nearest neighbour to be a judge, and thereby acquit himself and the whole family of guilt. And he shall cast forth the guilty thing beyond the border.”73 Teutonic law, which still recognised the principle of private revenge, treated the inanimate murderer with less ceremony.74 According to the Laws of Alfred, when men were at work together in a forest, and by misadventure one let a tree fall on another, which killed him, the tree belonged to the dead man’s kinsfolk if they took it away within thirty days.75 Later on, in England, a thing by which death was caused was “forfeited to God, that is to the King, God’s Lieutenant on earth, to be distributed in works of charity for the appeasing of God’s wrath.”76 This law remained in force till 1846.77
62 Macrae, in Asiatick Researches, vii. 189 sq.
63 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, p. 53.
64 Robertson, History of America, i. 351 sq.
65 Im Thurn, op. cit. p. 354.
66 Oldenberg, Religion des Veda, p. 518.
67 Herodotus, vii. 35.
68 Ibid. i. 190.
69 Pausanias, vi. 11. 6. Cf. ibid. v. 27. 10.
70 Frazer, Pausanias, ii. 371.
71 Aristotle, De republica Atheniensium, 57. Pausanias, i. 28. 10.
72 Demosthenes, Contra Aristocratem, 76, p. 645.
73 Plato, Leges, ix. 873 sq.
74 See Trummer, Vorträge über Tortur, &c. i. 376 sq. Brunner, Forschungen, p. 521 sqq.
75 Laws of Alfred, ii. 13.
76 Coke. Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, p. 57.
77 Stephen, History of the Criminal Law of England, iii. 78. Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law before the Time of Edward I. ii. 473.
In some of these cases superstitious dread may have been a motive for destroying or banishing the instrument of death. There are facts which prove that such an object is looked upon as a source of danger. According to the Ripuarian law, people are forbidden to make use of a thing which has been “auctor interfectionis”;78 and in Norway, in quite modern times, sickles, axes, and other objects with which men have been killed, have been seen lying about abandoned and unused.79 Again, among the aborigines of West Australia, if a person has been killed by a thrust of the native wooden spear, ghici, his country-men think that his soul remains in the point of the weapon which caused his death, and they burn it after his burial, so that the soul may depart.80 But it is also obvious that an inanimate thing which is the cause of a hurt is apt to evoke a genuine feeling of resentment. We kick the chair over which we stumble, we curse the stone which hurts us; Dr. Nansen says that, when he was crossing Greenland, it would have caused him “quite real satisfaction” to destroy a sledge which was “heavy to draw.”81 When we thus behave as if the offending object were capable of feeling our resentment, we for a moment vaguely believe that it is alive.82 But our anger very soon passes away when we realise the true nature of its object. The case is different with men at earlier stages of civilisation. They do not suppose that things which hurt them are senseless; on the contrary, they personify such things, not only hastily and momentarily, but deliberately and permanently; hence their resentment lasts. The Guiana Indian, says Sir E. F. Im Thurn, “attributes any calamity which may happen to him to the intention of the immediate instrument of its infliction, and he not unnaturally sees in the action of this instrument evidence of its possession of a spirit.”83 Trees, especially, are very commonly supposed to possess souls similar to those of men, and are treated accordingly.84 Pausanias writes that “lifeless things are said to have inflicted of their own accord a righteous punishment on men”; and as the best and most famous instance of this he mentions the sword of Cambyses.85 In England the inanimate murderer was to be given up to the kinsmen of the slain surely not as a compensation for the loss they had suffered, but as an object upon which their vengeance was to be wreaked.86 It was called la bane, that is, “the slayer”; Bracton also calls it the “malefactor.”87 It did not matter that its owner was recognised as innocent; the punishment was not intended for him.88 But in some well-defined cases the “slayer” was free from guilt. A ship or other vessel from which a person was drowned by misfortune was not forfeited as deodand in case the accident happened in salt water—as Coke indicates, on account of the great dangers to which the vessel is exposed