The bitter and often unreasoning hatred, on the part of many, of the institution and those who upheld it in this country, and the repugnance with which it came to be generally regarded by even sincere and generously inclined people in a section in which it was non-existent, were unquestionably largely induced by the constant contemplation from a distance of an institution the softer aspects of which could not be understood by strangers to its inner life,--but of which the one dominant feature was the bare fact of the bodily ownership of human beings,--the mere existence of the legal right to barter, sell and trade in human-kind. Of the relations between the master and his human chattels, and of the laws governing those relations, except in rare instances, they seemed to be ignorant,--as well, apparently, as of the safeguards with which a humane public sentiment surrounded the treatment of the slave, both by the law and the master. It is a brief consideration of some of these laws, as they stood upon the statute books of our own state during the earlier years of its history, that we beg to invite your attention. Under an old Federal ordinance, passed in 1787, for the government of the Northwest Territory, it was provided that in that territory there should be "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude," except of course for the punishment of crime. As the Congressional act of 1798, forming the Mississippi Territory, subjected it to the provisions of this ordinance, we note the somewhat curious fact that in Mississippi, in its incipient territorial organization, slavery was a prohibited institution. However, in the act of 1802, which for the first time provided for the establishment of a government in the Mississippi Territory, this provision alone of that ordinance was excepted, and slavery recognized as legal. The first provision concerning slavery which we find in our books, after Mississippi became a state, is contained in a clause in our first constitution, adopted in the town of Washington, August 15th, 1817, which provided that the Legislature might establish in each county a Court of Probate, for the discharge of various enumerated functions "and for the trial of slaves." This very first provision touching them seems to look to establishing proper legal means for their control, and in itself bears testimony to the falsity of the notion, which at that time some pretended to entertain, that the whim of the master was the sole law for the governing of the slave, and that the latter had no legal status whatever.