ment, no indictment was tried until after the expiration of the year and a day within which an appeal of felony might be instituted. This remained the practice until third Henry VII., when, in order to avoid these delays, it was enacted that acquittal on trial of an indictment should be no bar to an appeal of felony for the same offense. In the legislation of some countries, the conflict with reference to blood-avengement between the dictates of public policy on the one hand and the prevalent passions and notions of honor on the other was productive of a laughable incongruity. The law of Gottland, while making express provision for the appearance of the wrong-doer in court under safeguard, in order that he might offer the prosecutor a price in atonement of his offense, at the same time declared the prosecutor who accepted it at the first offer, even after the expiration of a year, to be a shameless person.
The tenacity with which the avenger adhered to his right of redress and the difficulty of controlling him in the exercise of this right are further attested by the character of the expedients by which it was sought to fortify measures aiming at his restraint. Thus Moses, though the Israelites were in his day quite familiar with the public prosecution of crimes, some of which were entirely withdrawn from the domain of private retaliation, found it still necessary to recognize the blood-avenger's right personally to pursue and slay without form of law the willful murderer: "The avenger of the blood shall slay the murderer; when he meeteth him he shall slay him."
But, as under most primitive codes of honor, so among the early Israelites the principle of blood-avengement was so malignant as to require retaliation even against the involuntary man-slayer. The instrument of death, whether man or beast, the avenger was in honor equally bound to destroy, without reference to the malicious or accidental character of the homicidal act. The flagrant injustice of punishing with death involuntary acts void of moral guilt, was in the Mosaic age, probably as manifest to large numbers of the Israelites as to Moses himself; yet so deeply rooted was the practice in the traditions of the people that the great law-giver dismissed as impracticable the idea of abolishing it. His scheme for ameliorating the hardships of both the willful murderer and the involuntary homicide by the designation of cities of refuge within the limits or vicinity of which they could find protection from the avenger, the former until he should have opportunity to prove his innocence, and the latter until the occurrence of some event with which his final discharge from liability could be plausibly linked, bears witness upon its face to the difficulty he anticipated in its enforcement. That his plan might be fortified by religious reverence and sacred associations, he provided for the selection of the cities of refuge from among the cities of the Levites, and dated the freedom of the excusable homicide from the death of the high priest. It is likely that among all early races the right of sanctuary
