And now, practically, what right has the north, or what right is claimed by the north, which the south has not to an equal extent?

A citizen of Boston has a right to educate his children at school, at the public expense.

In the Boston public schools, he can prepare his son to enter any college in this country, even though he is too poor to pay a cent for taxes, and never has paid a cent for taxes.

If the city of Boston debars him of this right of educating his son at the public charge, he can institute a suit against it and recover full damages.

I think those who use this argument, like the old Roman augurs, must smile at each other askance, for the credulity or simplicity of those they beguile by it.

Will not every man, even of the feeblest discernment, see the fallacy which is here covered up under the word “property?” What is meant by this deceptive term “property?” If you mean silver, or gold, or seeds, or grains, or sheep, or…

But you have special laws; local and peculiar laws,--laws contrary to the great principles of the common law, by which you call men and women property.

And then, forsooth, because we can carry property there, when property means grain and cattle, you can carry property there when it means human beings,--perhaps your own brothers, or sisters, or children.

Because we can carry our property there, when property means inanimate substances, you have only to call a human being property;--you have only to call a creature, formed in the image of God, property, and then he can be smuggled in under…

Why, sir, there is not a respectable village in the country, where, if a juggler or mountebank were to attempt to palm off upon his audience so flimsy a trick as this, he would not be hissed from the stage.

If any state in this Union had adopted polygamy as its peculiar institution, could an inhabitant of that state take a dozen wives with him into the new territories, and defend his claim to live with them there, because he could do so at…

Or, suppose, in pursuance of the “manifest destiny” principle, we should re-annex a part of China to this Union, could the Chinese, on removing to California, carry the practice of infanticide with them?

Just as well, I answer, and on precisely the same legal ground that the south can carry slavery into New Mexico.

The reason is that the law of slavery is a local law.

Like lotteries, or polygamy, or infanticide, it can legally exist in no land where the principles of the common law prevail, until it is legalized and sanctioned by a special law.

Then it is permitted on the simple ground that so much of the common law as secures liberty and property, the right of habeas corpus and freedom of speech to each individual, has been cut out and cast away.

Why did it not provide for the capture of a fugitive horse or ox?

These considerations demonstrate that slaves are not property, within the meaning of this word, when it is affirmed that if the north can carry its property into the territories, so can the south.

As the constitution, in terms, adopts the common law, it leaves slavery nothing to stand upon but the local laws of the states where it is established.

Freedom is the rule, slavery is the exception.

For, if slavery can be carried into any of our territories by force of the constitution, it can into all of them; and if carried into all of them, the exception becomes the rule, and the rule perishes.

I know it is said that the fact of slavery always precedes the law of slavery; that law does not go before the institution and create it, but comes afterwards to sanction and regulate it.

Homicide existed before law; the law came in subsequently, and declared that he who took an innocent man’s life without law, should lose his own by law.

The law came in to regulate homicide; to authorize the taking of human life for crime, just as we authorize involuntary servitude for crime; and it may just as well be argued that murder is a natural right because it existed before law, as…

So far from facilitating the increase of individual or national wealth, slavery retards both.