mulattoes, mestizoes or Indians as can prove they ought not to be sold as slaves”.[742] The acts, already mentioned in other connections, authorizing the enslavement of Indian captives taken in war, the holding in slavery of such captives when obtained in trade from sources outside the colony, and the enslavement of free Indians by the colonial authorities as punishment for misdemeanors and crimes, are also cases in point. From the standpoint of English law the action of the colonial legislatures enacting the slavery status had no legal sanction. It was based on the interpretation of the common law of nations, that is, it was carried on in accordance with a “law not promulgated by legislation, and rested upon prevalent views of universal jurisprudence, or the law of nations supported by the express or implied authority of the home government” concerning the institution of slavery.[743] So the colonies, by a gradual process of changing conditions and legal enactments, substituted the slavery status for the servitude status without molestation from the home government, which was interested in colonial slave conditions and legislation only when the African slave trade was involved. So long, therefore, as the enactment of colonial laws decreeing the slavery status did not interfere with that trade, the home government gave no attention to the matter. As for Indian slavery _per se_, if England had given it any attention whatever, she would probably have considered it a purely colonial matter. Since it was never sufficiently extensive to interfere with negro slavery and the slave trade, it never received any attention from the home government, and so existed as legal because never declared illegal. An authority on the legal status of early American slavery states: “It may be laid down as a legal axiom, that in all governments in which the municipal regulations are not absolutely opposed to slavery, persons already reduced to that state may be held in it, and we also assume, as a first principle, that slavery has been permitted and tolerated in all the colonies established in America by European powers, as relates to blacks and also as relates to Indians in the first periods of conquest and colonization. This accounts in a measure for the absence of any legislative act of European powers for intruding slavery into the American dominions.”[744] Hence it followed that the English colonial charters authorizing the colonial legislatures to make laws, gave no license as such to enslave.[745] With the change from the status of servitude to the status of slavery, certain of the attributes of the former condition were continued and connected with the latter. Chief of these, and the fundamental idea on which the change was effected, was the conception of property right which, from the idea of the ownership of an individual’s service resting upon contract implied or expressed, came to be that of the ownership of an individual’s person.