634 HORACE GRAY. 



159; s. c. 1 De Gex & Jones, 72; Marsh v. Means, 3 Jur. (n. s.) 

 790; Tatham v. Drummond, 11 Law Times (n. s.) 325. To deliver 

 men from a bondage which the law regards as contrary to natural right, 

 humanity, justice, and sound policy, is surely not less charitable than 

 to lessen the sufferings of animals. . . . This bequest directly tends to 

 carry out the principles thus declared in the fundamental law of the 

 Commonwealth. And certainly no kind of education could better accord 

 with the religion of Him who came to preach deliverance to the cap- 

 tives, and taught that you should love your neighbor as yourself and 

 do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. 



"The authorities already cited show that the peaceable redemption 

 or manumission of slaves in any mauner not prohibited by law is a char- 

 itable object. It falls indeed within the spirit, and almost within the 

 letter, of many clauses in the Statute of Elizabeth. It would be an 

 anomaly in a system of law, which recognized as charitable uses the 

 relief of the poor, the education and preferment of orphans, marriages 

 of poor maids, the assistance of young tradesmen, handicraftsmen, and 

 persons decayed, the relief of prisoners and the redemption of captives, 

 to exclude the deliverance of an indefinite number of human beings 

 from a condition in which they were so poor as not even to own them- 

 selves, in which their children could not be educated, in which mar- 

 riages had no sanction of law or security of duration, in which all their 

 earnings belonged to another, and they were subject, against the law of 

 nature, and without any crime of their own, to such an arbitrary dominion 

 as the modern usages of nations will not countenance over captives taken 

 from the most barbarous enemy. 



" The next question arises upon the bequest in trust for the benefit 

 of fugitive slaves who might from time to time escape from the slave- 

 holdins States of the Union. 



" The validity of this bequest must be determined according to the 

 law as it stood at the time when the testator died and from which his 

 will took effect. It is no part of the duty of this court to maintain the 

 constitutionality, the justice, or the policy of the fugitive slave acts, now 

 happily repealed. But the Constitution of the United States, at the 

 time of the testator's death, declared that no person held to service or 

 labor in one State should be discharged therefrom by escaping into an- 

 other. It may safely be assumed that, under such a constitution, a be- 

 quest to assist fugitive slaves to escape from those to whom their service 

 was thus recognized to be due, could not have been withheld and en- 

 forced as a lawful charity. The epithets with which the testator accom- 

 panied this bequest show that he set his own ideas of moral duty above his 



