This declaration is the source of much pride to Englishmen and Lord Campbell in his "Lives of the Chief Justices" goes into ecstasies over it. It is regarded as the enunciation of the great principle that the common law of England establishes universal freedom, and that wherever it prevails it knocks the shackles from the slave and turns him loose, a free man. Yet it was most probable that Somerset himself, and it was certain that his ancestor, if not himself, had been carried from Africa, in a ship that had been fitted out under the protection of that very common law by men breathing that same pure air, and sold into slavery in a colony to which the same law under which he was released, had followed the colonists. Was ever so absurd a farce enacted as that which was enacted by the Chief Justice of England, when he announced in Westminster Hall before the assembled bar of London, that the air breathed by a nation of slave-traders was too pure for the slave himself. None but an Englishman would have failed to discover its absurdity. Where then, was that "genius of universal emancipation" referred to at a later period at the Irish Bar by Curran, in such eloquent language, that it did not waft these words on the wings of that pure air across the channel to the Emerald Isle, to the coasts of Africa, to the plantations of America and the West Indies, or to the banks of the Ganges? Could not a breath of that pure air be afforded at least for the ships of the British Navy, then so sedulously guarding English slave ships through the horrors of the "Middle Passage" from French cruisers? No! that pure air was "fixed air" which could not extend beyond the shores of England, and the wings of the "genius of universal emancipation" were so clipped that it was a more clumsy domestic bird than the barnyard fowl. At the same time that these celebrated words were uttered in Westminster Hall, the ministers of State, and king, lords and commons in Parliament, were cherishing with a fostering hand that very trade which had consigned Somerset to slavery, and was then consigning thousands upon thousands of his native countrymen to the same fate while the boasted navy of the "Mistress of the Seas" was escorting the human cargoes in safety and triumph to their destination, and in the colonies writs and executions were being issued, according to forms framed in Westminster Hall, to enforce from the sale of the bodies of human beings, the collection of debts, due to men who breathed the "pure air of England," and prided themselves on the liberties of the common law.