PERSONAL LIBERTY. 441 



Metcalf, 111, 1842.) The attempt had been made to hold certain 

 men guilty of conspiracy because the members of a union or 

 society had agreed not to work for any person who employed 

 others not members of such union. The learned judge held (p. 

 128) : " The averment is this — that the defendants and others 

 formed themselves into a society, and agreed not to work for 

 any person who should employ any journeyman or other person 

 not a member of such society after notice given him to discharge 

 such workman. ... (p. 130) The case supposes that these per- 

 sons are not bound by contract, but free to work for whom they 

 please, or not to work if they so prefer. In this state of things 

 we can not perceive that it is criminal for men to agree together 

 to exercise their acknowledged rights in such a manner as best to 

 subserve their own interests." 



The right of the workman to free contract is fully sustained 

 by this decision ; he is left as free to refuse to work as he is free 

 to work upon any terms that he may choose to work. 



But when the attempt of a slave-master to control the service 

 of him who had been held a slave in another State was made, 

 Chief-Justice Shaw maintained the right of personal liberty in 

 terms which no Congress, no Legislature, and no court would now 

 dare to contravene.* 



When Legislatures and trades-unions attempt to impair the 

 personal liberty of men, and to take from them the right to control 

 their own time, the act differs only from the claim of the slave- 

 holder in degree but not in kind ; and when an appeal is taken to 

 the courts, the great judge may again annul the act or the ordi- 

 nance, citing in support of his decision Chief-Justice Parsons, who 

 declared that no slave could breathe the air of Massachusetts ; and 

 Chief -Justice Shaw, who ruled that no man should even attempt 

 to impair the personal liberty of him who dwelt upon our soil, 

 even were it only for a single day. 



In the case of the People vs. Gilson, adjudicated in New York 

 in 1888 (N'ewYork Reports, vol. 109, p. 389), Justice Peckham 

 gave a broad and lucid construction to the term " liberty " in the 

 following words (p. 398) : " The term ' liberty,' as used in the 

 Constitution, is not dwarfed into mere freedom from physical 

 restraint of the person of the citizen, as by incarceration, but it is 

 deemed to embrace the right of man to be free in the enjoyment 

 of his faculties with which he has been endowed by the Creator, 

 subject only to such restraints as are necessary for the common 

 welfare. Liberty in its broad sense, as understood in this coun- 

 try, means not only the right of freedom from servitude, im- 

 prisonment, or restraint, but the right of one to use his faculties 



* Commonwealth vs. Aves, 18 Pick., 193 (1836). 



