By the papers of this city, as I open them every morning, I see that lotteries are authorized by more or less of the Southern States. Their “schemes” are regularly advertised. I remember, when stopping for a day in one of the southern cities, that some half-official looking personages came into the hotel, cleared a large space in the public hall, set down a rotary machine, and proceeded to draw a lottery. Now, in Massachusetts, and in many of the Northern States, lotteries are prohibited, under severe penalties. With us, it is highly penal to advertise a lottery in any form, to placard one at the corners of the streets, or to exhibit any plan or emblem of one at a shop window. We act upon the well-known truth, that there is a much less number of persons who draw any considerable prize in a lottery, than there are who are killed by lightning; and therefore, whatever chance a ticket-holder has of drawing any considerable prize, we know that he has a much greater chance of being killed by lightning. Now, when a citizen of Virginia and a citizen of Massachusetts go to the new territories, does the former carry his right to establish and draw a lottery, or the latter carry his right to prosecute the other for doing so? Neither; certainly neither. Both have left the local law behind them. If any state in this Union had adopted polygamy as its peculiar institution, could an inhabitant of that state take a dozen wives with him into the new territories, and defend his claim to live with them there, because he could do so at home? Or, suppose, in pursuance of the “manifest destiny” principle, we should _re_-annex a part of China to this Union, could the Chinese, on removing to California, carry the practice of infanticide with them? Just as well, I answer, and on precisely the same legal ground that the south can carry slavery into New Mexico. The reason is that the law of slavery is a _local_ law. Like lotteries, or polygamy, or infanticide, it can legally exist in no land where the principles of the common law prevail, until it is legalized and sanctioned by a special law. Then it is permitted on the simple ground that so much of the common law as secures liberty and property, the right of _habeas corpus_ and freedom of speech to each individual, has been cut out and cast away. The constitution proceeds upon this doctrine when it provides for the recapture of fugitive slaves. Why did it not provide for the capture of a fugitive horse or ox? Why did it not provide that, if a horse or an ox should escape from a slave state into a free state, it should be delivered up, or be recoverable by legal process? Because horses and oxen are _property_, by the common consent of mankind. It needed no law to make them property. They are property by the law of nations, by the English common law, by the law of every state in this Union,--_while men and women are not_. An escaped slave could not be recovered before the adoption of the constitution.