“We are accustomed, Sir, to praise the lawgivers of antiquity; we help to perpetuate the fame of Solon and Lycurgus; but I doubt whether one single law of any lawgiver, ancient or modern, has produced effects of more distinct, marked, and lasting character than the Ordinance of 1787.… It fixed forever the character of the population in the vast regions northwest of the Ohio, by excluding from them involuntary servitude. It impressed on the soil itself, while it was yet a wilderness, an incapacity to sustain any other than freemen. _It laid the interdict against personal servitude in original compact, not only deeper than all local law, but deeper also than all local constitutions._”[219] Words of greater beauty and power cannot be found anywhere in the writings or speeches of our American orator. It would be difficult to declare the perpetual character of this original interdict more completely. The language is as picturesque as truthful. Deeper than all local law, deeper than all local constitutions, is this fundamental law; and such is its essential quality, that the soil which it protects cannot sustain any other than freemen. Of such a law the orator naturally proceeded to say:-- “We see its consequences at this moment; and we shall never cease to see them, perhaps, while the Ohio shall flow. _It was a great and salutary measure of prevention._”[220] In these last words the value of such a law is declared. It is for _prevention_, which is an essential object of all law. In this case it is the more important, as the evil to be prevented is the most comprehensive of all. Therefore, on the authority of Mr. Webster, in harmony with reason also, do I say, that this original condition was not only perpetual in character, but beneficent also. It was beneficence in perpetuity. Mr. Chase, in his admirable argument before the Supreme Court of the United States, in the _Vanzandt_ case, is hardly behind Mr. Webster in homage to this Ordinance, or in a sense of its binding character. In his opinion it is a compact of perpetual obligation:--