credit for their idealism, three points must be made. First, the decision is isolated and, considering the total acceptance of the social fact of slavery, moral concern on this point looks a trifle artificial. After all, masters legally had complete power of life and death over their slaves. Secondly, the child born to the slave, it is held, is not fruit - but this does not mean that the child is free. It means only that she or he belongs to the mother’s owner and not the usufructuary. There is a certain emptiness in the application of the philosophical principle. Thirdly, and this is the most important point of all, the natural result of the decision is the immediate separation of the mother and child. The mother is under the control of the usufructuary. The child does not belong to the usufructuary who does not even have a usufruct in him. The child does not form part of the usufruct and hence the usufructuary, as such, has no liability for him. The usufructuary would seem to have no legal responsibility to look after the child in terms of the guarantee normally given by the usufructuary to the owner at the beginning of the usufruct. The usufructuary, moreover, has no legal right to retain custody of the child. The person with the legal right of custody is the owner. So, looked at in legal terms, the result is that the mother stays with the usufructuary, the child goes to the owner. The consequences of the decision can fairly be said to be appalling. Of course, we cannot tell how frequently in practice the usufructuary might nonetheless keep the child in his household at his expense. But it must often or even usually have been the case that the child would be sent back to his owner. Apart from the initial misery of the separation of mother and child, there is the further consideration that the owner would often regard it as troublesome to have to bring up a slave child without his mother. One would imagine that, inevitably, it would sometimes happen that the child would simply be exposed and left to die and that it would often happen that the child would be sold to a slave owner
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