42. Slavery, complicating and confounding the ideas of property
(that is, of a thing), and of personality (that is, of humanity),
exists according to municipal or local law only. The law of nature
and nations has never acknowledged it. The digest of the Roman law
enacts the early dictum of the pagan jurist, that "so far as the
law of nature is concerned, all men are equal." Fugitives escaping
from a country in which they were slaves, villains, or serfs, into
another country, have, for centuries past, been held free and
acknowledged free by judicial decisions of European countries, even
though the municipal law of the country in which the slave had
taken refuge acknowledged slavery within its own dominions.
(Official Records, Ser. 3, Vol. 3, p. 153)
12:24 PM 5/30/2006
