A term which has not obtained a juridical use distinct from the vernacular, in which it is either taken as a synonym with slavery, or as applicable to any kind of personal servitude which is in- voluntary in its continuation. The propriety of making it a distinct juridical term depends upon the sense given to the word slavery. If slave be understood to mean, exclu- sively, a natural person who, in law, is known as an object in respect to which legal persons may have rights of possession or property, as in respect to domestic animals and inanimate things, it is evident that any one who is regarded as a legal person, ca- pable of rights and obligations in other relations, while bound by law to render service to another, is not a slave in the same sense of the word. Such a one stands in a legal relation, being under an obli- gation correlative to the right of the person who is by law entitled to his service, and, though not an object of property, nor possessed or owned as a chattel or thing, he is a person bound to the other, and may be called & bondman, in distinction from a slave as above understood. A greater or less num- ber of rights may be attributed to persons bound to renier service. Bondage may subsist under many forms. Where the rights attributed are such as can be exhibited in very limited spheres of action only, or are very imperfectly protected, it may be difficult to see wherein the condition, though nomi- nally that of a legal person, differs from chattel slavery. Still, the two conditions have been plainly distinguishable under many legal systems, and even as existing at the same time under one source of law. The Hebrews may have held persons of other nations as slaves of that chattel condition which an- ciently was recognized by the laws of all Asiatic ani European nations; but they held persons of their own wn nation in bondage only as legal persons capable of rights, while under an obligation to serve. Cobb's Hist. Sketch, ch. 1. When the serf- dom of feudal times was first established, the two coalitions were coexistent in every part of Europe (ibid. ch. 7), though afterwards the bondage of serf- dom was for a long period the only form known there until the revival of chattel slavery, by the introduction of negro slaves into European com- merce, in the sixteenth century. Every villein' un- der the English law was clearly a legal person capa ble of some legal rights, whatever might be the na- ture of his services. Co. Litt. 123 b; Coke, 2d Inst. 45. But at the first recognition of negro slavery in the jurisprudence of England and her her d colonies, the siave was clearly a natural person, known to the law as an object of possession or property for others, having no legal personality, who therefore, in many legal respects, resembled a thing or chattel. It is true that the moral responsibility of the slave and the duty of others to treat him as an accountable human being and not as a domestic animal were al- ways more or less clearly recognized in the criminal jurisprulence. There has always been in his con- dition a mingling of the qualities of person and of thing, which has led to many legal contradictions. But while no rights or obligations, in relations be- tween him and other natural persons such as might be judicially enforced by or against him, were attri- buted to him, there was a propriety in distinguish- ing the condition as chattel slavery, even though the term itself implies that there is an essential distinc- tion between such a person and natural things, of which it seems absurd to say that they are either free or not free. The phrases instar rerum, tan- quam bona, are aptly used by older writers. The bondage of the villein could not be thus character- Ized; and there is no historical connection between the principles which determine.l the existence of the one and those which sanctioned the other. The law of English villenage furnished no rules applicable to negro slavery in America. 5 Rand. 680, 688; 2 Hill, Ch. S. C. 390; 9 Ga. 561; 1 Hurd, Law of Free-1 dom and Bondage, cc. 4, 5. Slavery in the colonies was entirely distinct from the condition of those white persons who were held to service for years, which was involuntary in its continuance, though founded in most instances on contract. These per- sons had legal rights, not only in respect to the com- munity at large, but also in respect to the person to whom they owed service. In the American slaveholding states before the Civil War, the moral personality of those held in the customary slavery was recognized by jurisprudence and statute to an extent which makes it difficult to say whether, there, slaves were by law regarded as things and not legal persons (though subject to the laws which regulate the title and transfer of prop- erty), or whether they were still things and prop- erty in the same sense and degree in which they were so formerly. Compare laws and authorities in Cobb's Law of Negro Slavery, ch. iv., v. The Emanc