i828.] Notes for Die Month. 59 



added a little starvation ; and there is this time no defence, nor any 

 cure : the line has been crossed ; the command is peremptory, and 

 " the Indentures must he cancelled !" It may be added, that the pre- 

 tensions of the Turks founded oddly enough upon the fact of their 

 weakness, not upon their strength must consent to a little general 

 abatement in the present age. We tolerate something and have tolerated 

 a great deal to maintain a particular power in a position which it is ge- 

 nerally convenient that it should hold: but that such a power should claim 

 to take any tone that wildness and bigotry may dictate, and threaten, like 

 a pettish child, that If we do not permit it to do this, it will deliver 

 itself up to destruction ! , This is too much. If as one of our ambassa- 

 dors is reported to have said " If they will have their ruin, they must 

 have their ruin !" Their existence was convenient : being lost like other 

 conveniences that we lose, we must find some way to do without them. 



In the home affairs of the country, no novelty presents itself; and in 

 the courts of the law not much excepting Lord Stowell's decision in the 

 well-known cause of " The Slave Grace ;" which has excited a great 

 deal of curiosity ; and the more, inasmuch as it gives the rule in several 

 other cases (nearly similar) which are pending before the court. 



The point presented in this case to Lord Stowell, stripped of the 

 enormous mass of illustration and legal argument which has been laid 

 out upon it, is shortly this : " Whether or not the admitted original 

 owner of any given slave, resident in any of the British Colonies that 

 slave having landed in England, where, according to the law laid down 

 by Lord Mansfield, he would be free would recover his property in such 

 slave, and could enforce his title to possession, on his (the slave's) return 

 to the colony from which he had departed ?" Lord Stowell's opinion 

 has been, that the slave might be so recovered ; and the legal accuracy 

 of that opinion is generally admitted, though a strong feeling prevails 

 against its reasonableness or justice : but the fact is, that the case is, in 

 every view, one of very great inconvenience and perplexity ; and an 

 opposite decision however we are inclined, in any question between 

 liberty and slavery, to give the benefit of a doubt freely to the former 

 would not settle the point to our entire satisfaction. 



Lord Mansfield's judgment in the " Somerset" case no doubt declared, 

 unequivocally, that every slave, the moment he landed in England, became 

 free. And the sticklers for the unrestrained reading of this dictum put 

 their question very strongly " How is it," they ask, " that a man whom 

 you admit to be free in England, by taking a voyage to Jamaica, becomes 

 a slave ?" A striking illustration is added of the possible cruel effect of 

 such a law, in the supposed case of a female slave from the West Indies 

 contracting marriage, as a free woman, in this country, with an English 

 subject ; when, in case the parties, ten years afterwards, happened by 

 any chance to find themselves in the West-Indies, this freeman's wife, 

 perhaps with a family (as, by the colonial law, the children follow the 

 state of the mother), might be seized by her original owner, or his heirs, 

 and, without remedy, carried away as a slave. 



Now to that part of the complaint here which touches the children, we 

 should be inclined to demur : the children, being British born subjects, 

 we apprehend, could never, under any circumstances, be condemned as 

 slaves. But to the rest of the case no answer can be given : the thing 

 might undoubtedly occur as it is stated. It is very difficult, we agree, to 

 see by what process or operation, a man who goes on ship-board free in 



I 2 



