Thus, in those days, a partisan of Slavery, while asserting its divine origin, and vindicating the rendition of fugitive slaves, recognized the claim of the master as “a suit at Common Law,” to be tried by a jury; and this he _insisted_ was prescribed by the Constitution. But if this Senator could claim trial by jury for the protection of his pretended property, with much greater reason might the fugitive claim trial by jury for the protection of his liberty. Surely, now, when Liberty is regaining her lost foothold, this protection will not be denied. OBJECTIONS TO TRIAL BY JURY. To this array of reason and authority there are but two attempts at reply, so far as the Committee is informed. (1.) The first asserts that the rendition of the slave under the Act of Congress is a “preliminary” proceeding, in the nature of _extradition_, which does not establish any right between the parties, but simply hands the slave over to the local jurisdiction from which he escaped, and therefore trial by jury is unnecessary. But this pretension is founded on a plain misapprehension. It forgets, in the first place, that by ancient authority a “claim” for a fugitive slave is unquestionably a “suit at Common Law,” to be determined by a jury _before the judgment of rendition_. And it forgets, in the second place, that the proceedings are in no respect “preliminary”; that they do not contemplate any other trial between the parties, but that they fix absolutely the relations of the parties, making one of them master and the other slave; that the certificate of rendition is absolute and unimpeachable by any human tribunal, so that the claimant, from the moment of its issue, may assert unqualified ownership over the fugitive; that, under this certificate, he may proceed at once to demand service and labor, and enforce his demand by the lash; and that, instead of returning the victim to that local jurisdiction from which he is alleged to have escaped, the claimant may hurry him, chained and manacled, to some distant plantation, where the only judge will be an overseer, and the only jury the creatures who aid in enforcing a terrible power. And the argument forgets, also, that this cruel judgment may be inflicted upon a freeman, who, perhaps, has never left his Northern home, but whose fate will be fixed beyond appeal by the mere certificate of a commissioner. Surely this simple statement is enough.