There are certain kinds of restraint required, according to native ideas, for the government of families and forming, according both to law and custom, part of the rights of heads of families, Mussulman and Hindoo, which are not to be included under the title slavery. In legislating, therefore, on slavery, though it may not be easy to define the term precisely, it is necessary that the state to which your measures are meant to apply be described with due care.

The origin of a great part of it is in seasons of scarcity, when a parent who is unable to maintain his child sells him to some person of ample means. He is then reared as part of the family into which he is received, and feels himself on a level, but little below, and even sometimes above, that of an ordinary servant. To dissolve such a connection by forcible means would in general be to inflict an injury on the emancipated individual. The means of escape, where the colour, features and shape of the slave are not distinguished from those of other classes, and in a country of vast extent, facilitating distant removal, are so easy that the treatment of a slave cannot be worse than that of an ordinary servant, without giving him adequate motive to abscond; and the market value is so small that it is seldom worth while to be at the trouble of sending after him.