prevent even the accident of a contrary occurrence, your Lordship knows, that there is a counsellour appointed to the board of trade here, whose especial business it is, to examine all the colony acts, and thereupon to make his report, if necessary, previous to the royal confirmation of them. If property, therefore, in Negroes, was repugnant to the law of England, it could not be the law of America: for (besides the reasons already assigned) by the same statute wherever this repugnancy is, there the law is _ipso facto_ null and void. But I will further endeavour to elucidate this matter, by begging a question or two, by way of case in point. Let it be admitted then, that a colony of English had embarked from hence, in order to establish settlements for themselves in some one of the late ceded islands in the West Indies, and that they were arrived, it may be said, in the island, _where English troops, trampling on the laws of God and man, are slaughtering even to extirpation a guiltless race of Caribs, the aborigines of the country. I mean the island of St. Vincent, an island under the tutelage of a Saint too_! And suppose that, upon their arrival there, the Legislature of that country had taken it into their heads to pass an act similar to the 25th of Geo. II. ch. xl. already referred to, thereby vesting these people as property, in certain owners allotted to them: I should be glad to know, my Lord, whether this act could possibly have operated as a law, and whether it was not, _eo instanti_, upon its being enacted, destitute and void of all force, validity, and effect? Your Lordship’s answer doubtless would be, that this act must have been its own executioner, that it was _felo de se_. Why then, my Lord, does not the principle directive of this conclusion on the case of the colony of English, determine likewise on the case of the Negroes? If an act of an American plantation making property of a colony of English there, is nullified _ab initio_ from its being enacted, why is not an act making property of a colony of Africans susceptible of the same nullity? The reason, my Lord, is twofold: first, because in the one act, such a law is not only repugnant to, but absolutely subversive of, the laws of England: secondly, because in the other act, such a law is not only consistent with, but founded on, the laws of England: and this, my Lord, proves to mathematical demonstration, that the colony laws are not only in general dependant on the laws of England, but, in particular instances, owe their origin and source to them: so that, as the refracted rays of light, diverging from one point through a prism, may be concentred in the same focus; in like manner may these laws, notwithstanding their number and variety, be collected and disposed of in one common system or digest, as parts of the same whole. From what therefore I have here suggested, my Lord, I mean to conclude generally, that the right and property, not only of Mr.