the heathen?  Suppose a case.  A foreign servant flees to the Israelites; God says, “He shall dwell with thee, in that place which he shall choose, in one of thy gates where it liketh him best.”  Now, suppose this same servant, instead of coming into Israel of his own accord, had been dragged in by some kidnapper who bought him of his master, and forced him into a condition against his will; would He who forbade such treatment of the stranger, who voluntarily came into the land, sanction the same treatment of the same person, provided in addition to this last outrage, the previous one had been committed of forcing him into the nation against his will?  To commit violence on the free choice of a foreign servant is forsooth a horrible enormity, PROVIDED you begin the violence after he has come among you.  But if you commit the first act on the other side of the line; if you begin the outrage by buying him from a third person against his will, and then tear him from home, drag him across the line into the land of Israel, and hold him as a slave—­ah! that alters the case, and you may perpetrate the violence now with impunity!  Would greater favor have been shown to this new comer than to the old residents—­those who had been servants in Jewish families perhaps for a generation?  Were the Israelites commanded to exercise toward him, uncircumcised and out of the covenant, a justice and kindness denied to the multitudes who were circumcised, and within the covenant?  But, the objector finds small gain to his argument on the supposition that the covenant respected merely the fugitives from the surrounding nations, while it left the servants of the Israelites in a condition against their wills.  In that case, the surrounding nations would adopt retaliatory measures, and become so many asylums for Jewish fugitives.  As these nations were not only on every side of them, but in their midst, such a proclamation would have been an effectual lure to men whose condition was a constant counteraction of will.  Besides the same command which protected the servant from the power of his foreign master, protected him equally from the power of an Israelite.  It was not, “Thou shalt not deliver him unto his master,” but “he shall dwell with thee, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates where it liketh him best.”  Every Israelite was forbidden to put him in any condition against his will.  What was this but a proclamation, that all who chose to live in the land and obey the laws, were left to their own free will, to dispose of their services at such a rate, to such persons and in such places as they pleased?  Besides, grant that this command prohibited the sending back of foreign servants merely, there was no law requiring the return of servants who had escaped from