or authority. These
considerations however they would readily forego, renounce their fealty,
and quit their country, if in any case they were in danger of paying with
life the forfeit of their crimes; to lesser punishments those ties induce
them to submit; and to strengthen this hold their customs wisely enjoin
that every the remotest branch of the family shall be responsible for the
payment of their adjudged and other debts; and in cases of murder the
bangun, or compensation, may be levied on the inhabitants of the village
the culprit belonged to, if it happens that neither he nor any of his
relations can be found.

The equality of punishment, which allows to the rich man the faculty of
committing, with small inconvenience, crimes that bring utter destruction
on the poor man and his family, and which is in fact the greatest
inequality, originates certainly from the interested design of those
through whose influence the regulation came to be adopted. Its view was
to establish a subordination of persons. In Europe the absolute
distinction between rich and poor, though too sensibly felt, is not
insisted upon in speculation, but rather denied or explained away in
general reasoning. Among the Sumatrans it is coolly acknowledged, and a
man without property, family, or connexions never, in the partiality of
self-love, considers his own life as being of equal value with that of a
man of substance. A maxim, though not the practice, of their law, says,
"that he who is able to pay the bangun for murder must satisfy the
relations of the deceased; he who is unable, must suffer death." But the
avarice of the relations prefers selling the body of the delinquent for
what his slavery will fetch them (for such is the effect of imposing a
penalty that cannot be paid) to the satisfaction of seeing the murder
revenged by the public execution of a culprit of that mean description.
Capital punishments are therefore almost totally out of use among them;
and it is only par la loi du plus fort that the Europeans take the
liberty of hanging a notorious criminal now and then, whom however their
own chiefs always condemn, and formally sentence.

CORPORAL PUNISHMENT.

Corporal punishment of any kind is rare. The chain, and a sort of stocks,
made of the pinang tree, are adopted from us; the word pasong, now
commonly used to denote the latter, originally signifying and being still
frequently applied to confinement in general. A kind of cage made us