Page:A legal review of the case of Dred Scott, as decided by the Supreme Court of the United States.djvu/18

 "subjects," and "inhabitants," as entirely synonymous and convertible terms. This is sufficiently shown by the following articles of the Declaration of Rights, prefixed to that Constitution: "All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; and that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property." "No subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained, in his person, liberty, or estate, for worshipping God in the manner and season most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience." "Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for the profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men." "All the inhabitants of this Commonwealth, having such qualifications as they shall establish by their frame of government, have an equal right to elect officers, and to be elected for public employments." "Every subject of the Commonwealth ought to find a certain remedy, by having recourse to the laws, for all injuries or wrongs which he may receive in his person, property or character." "In criminal prosecutions, the verification of facts in the vicinity where they happen, is one of the greatest securities of the life, liberty, and property of the citizen." And it may be truly said of each of these clauses, as was said by Chief Justice Shaw of that first cited: "That the description was broad enough in its terms to embrace negroes, and that it was intended by the framers of the Constitution to embrace them, is proved by the earliest contemporaneous construction, by an unbroken series of judicial decisions, and by a uniform practice from the adoption of the Constitution to the present time. The whole tenor of our policy, of our legislation and jurisprudence, from that time to the present, has been consistent with this construction, and with no other." Commonwealth v. Aves, 18 Pick. 210.

To meet these well authenticated facts, the only evidence which Chief Justice Taney produces to prove "the degraded condition of this unhappy race" in Massachusetts, and in support of his theory that they were no part of the people of that State, is the statute prohibition, which existed for more than a hundred years, of marriage between them and white persons—a prohibition founded on purely physiological grounds, and which no more shows the degraded condition of one race than of the other. A similar prohibition, and for similar reasons, applied and still applies to