It is true, there can be no such thing as property in man: and here I begin to answer the questions propounded by the Senator from Kentucky [Mr. DAVIS]. If this pretension is recognized anywhere, it is only another instance of custom, which is so powerful as to render the idolater insensible to the wickedness of idolatry, and the cannibal insensible to the brutality of cannibalism. To argue against such a pretension seems to be vain; for the pretension exists in open defiance of reason as well as of humanity. It will not yield to argument; nor will it yield to persuasion. It must be encountered by authority. It was not the planters in the British islands or in the French islands who organized emancipation, but the distant governments across the sea, far removed from local prejudice, which at last forbade the outrage. Had these planters been left to themselves, they would have clung to the pretension, as men among us still cling to it. In making this declaration against the idea of property in man, I say nothing new. An honored predecessor of the Senator from Maryland [Mr. KENNEDY], whose fame as a statesman was eclipsed, perhaps, by his more remarkable fame as a lawyer,--I mean William Pinkney, and it is among the recollections of my youth that I heard Chief Justice Marshall call him the undoubted head of the American bar,--in a speech before the Maryland House of Delegates, spoke as statesman and lawyer, when he said:-- “Sir, by the eternal principles of natural justice no master in the State has a right to hold his slave in bondage for a single hour.”[215] And Henry Brougham spoke not only as statesman and lawyer, but as orator also, when, in the British Parliament, he uttered these memorable words:-- “Tell me not of rights, talk not of the property of the planter in his slaves. I deny the right, I acknowledge not the property. The principles, the feelings, of our common nature rise in rebellion against it. Be the appeal made to the understanding or to the heart, the sentence is the same that rejects it. In vain you tell me of laws that sanction such a claim. There is a law above all the enactments of human codes,--the same throughout the world, the same in all times: … it is the law written on the heart of man by the finger of his Maker; and by that law, unchangeable and eternal, while men despise fraud and loathe rapine and abhor blood, they will reject with indignation the wild and guilty fantasy that man can hold property in man.”[216] It has been sometimes said that the finest sentence of the English language is that famous description of Law with which Hooker closes the first book of his “Ecclesiastical Polity”; but I cannot doubt that this wonderful denunciation of an irrational and inhuman pretension will be remembered hereafter with higher praise; for it gathers into surpassing eloquence the waking and immitigable instincts of Universal Man.