Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 9.djvu/228

 THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS jurer, however bald and naked, who could not invent some pretext to palliate his crime, or who could not, for fifteen shillings, hire an Old Bailey lawyer to invent some for him. Yet this requirement of the Constitution is another one of the extreme demands of an extremist and a rebel. The next stipulation is that fugitive slaves shall be surrendered under the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, without being entitled either to a writ of habeas corpus, or trial by jury, or other similar obstructions of legislation, in the State to which he may flee. Here is the Constitution : ''No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law cr regulation therein, be dis- charged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.'* This language is plain, and everybody under- stood it the same way for the first forty years of your government. In 1793, in Washington's time, an act was passed to carry out this pro- vision. It was adopted unanimously in the Senate of the Unitecl States, and nearly so in the House of Representatives. Nobody then had invented pretexts to show that the Constitution did not mean a negro slave. It was clear; it "was plain. Not only the federal courts, but all the local courts in all the States, decided 218