the voyage. It is an historical fact, also, that as late as 1815 an English wife, but one month married, was haltered by her husband, led to Smithfield, and there sold at auction. If my recollection serves me rightly, as late as the close of the eighteenth century slavery existed in England, in the colonies of France and Spain, in Scotland, Prussia, Hungary, Austria, and Russia."
As the conversation proceeded freely onward, the Chief Justice read that noble document, the Emancipation Proclamation,to our student, and he listened with reverent attention to that series of constitutional amendments which again declare "that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, the chief of which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ; and to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men."
When the Proclamation, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and the acts of Congress in pursuance thereof, had been read and the volumes were closed, the divine truth was revealed to the calm , dispassionate inquirer, and he exclaimed, with a warmth unusual with him, "After the lapse, then, of almost two centuries, the Republican party has rolled away the stone from the sepulchre of American Freedom!"
The Chief Justice, a devout believer in the Providence which directs the ways of empires, replied: "It seems to me as if, from the dawn of creation, the invincible spirit of liberty had brooded, with eternal vigilance , over the deeps of this infernal darkness; that, with the Proclamation of Emancipation, which the patriot President sealed with his blood, the long, loud chants of freedom ascended on high,and were heard and regarded in the courts of heaven; and that the auspicious rays of its celestial light still warm and illumine the last and noblest empire of time."
"If you will not consider it presumption in a foreigner to speak so despairingly of your countrymen," said the student, "I think they depreciate civil liberty itself when they nullify such integral parts of your Constitution as these amendments. Is it not highly probable that a broader discernment of their true nature, and a deeper and fuller conception of the spirit and meaning of the terms employed, may fundamentally modify the present attitude of thoughtful minds towards the subject of race
