The power to seize upon escaping slaves was one of the motives for adopting it. These considerations demonstrate that slaves are not _property_, within the meaning of this word, when it is affirmed that if the north can carry _its_ property into the territories, so can the south. As the constitution, in terms, adopts the common law, it leaves slavery nothing to stand upon but the local laws of the states where it is established. Freedom is the rule, slavery is the exception. Judge Berrien’s favorite doctrine of equality would, therefore, be destroyed, if the exception should prevail over the rule. For, if slavery can be carried into any of our territories by force of the constitution, it can into all of them; and if carried into all of them, the exception becomes the rule, and the rule perishes. Ay, the rule ceases to be even so much as an exception to that which was _its_ own exception. It is wholly swallowed up and lost. I know it is said that the _fact_ of slavery always precedes the _law_ of slavery; that _law_ does not go before the institution and create it, but comes afterwards to sanction and regulate it. But this is no more true of slavery than of every other institution or practice among mankind, whether right or wrong. Homicide existed before law; the law came in subsequently, and declared that he who took an innocent man’s life without law, should lose his own by law. The law came in to regulate homicide; to authorize the taking of human life for crime, just as we authorize involuntary servitude for crime; and it may just as well be argued that murder is a natural right because it existed before law, as that slavery is a natural right because it existed before law. _This argument appeals to the crime which the law was enacted to prevent, in order to establish the supremacy of the crime over the law that forbids it._ There is another fallacy in the arguments which southern gentlemen use on this subject, which, though not as transparent as the preceding, is quite as unsound. They speak of the _rights_ of the slaveholder in the new territories. They speak as though the collective ownership of the territories by the government, were the ownership of the people in severalty; as though each citizen could go there and draw a line round a “placer,” and say _this is mine_; and then, _because it is his_, introduce his slaves upon it. But nothing is more clear than that there is no such _individual_ right. The right of the government is, _first_, a right of sovereignty and jurisdiction; and _second_, the right of ownership of all lands, navigable waters, &c., which have not been conveyed away by the preëxisting government. Individuals retain their citizenship on going there, as they do on going to Great Britain, or France; but a slave has just as much right to a portion of the public lands in California, when he gets there, as his master.