The victory of the pro-slavery radicals was here complete. The decision gave them the definite judgment of that Supreme Court whose decisions rise above congressional enactment and set aside statutes,--that court from whose judgments there is nowhere any appeal to any other authority on earth--in behalf of their most extreme contentions. If that decision had been accepted by the people, as the decisions of the Supreme Court usually are, it would indeed have made slavery a national institution subject only to such limitations as the individual states might impose upon it within their own borders and without interference with slaveholders who might choose to take their slaves into free states and hold them there. But the victory of the slave advocates--complete as it was--gave them no practical advantage. Such a doctrine as that laid down by the court simply could not find acceptance in the minds of men at the North. Logically it ought not to have found acceptance with the ultra pro-slavery men of the South for the reason that it distinctly negatived that contention for states' rights and state sovereignty upon which they relied in their contest with their adversaries. Unfortunately for them, in the course of his decision Chief Justice Taney used one unhappy phrase which gave even greater offense perhaps than the decision itself did. That phrase was in fact no part of the decision but was what the lawyers call an _obiter dictum_--a saying apart. It was a mere statement of what the Chief Justice believed to be a fact of history. It was not at all a ruling of the court. As an illustration of his meaning he made the perfectly true statement that before the time of the American Revolution--and he might have included a much later date--the negroes "_had been regarded_ as beings of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had _no rights which the white man was bound to respect_; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit." This statement of fact as to the attitude of the public mind toward the negro before the Revolution was entirely correct, as every educated reader knows, and as the history of the African slave-trade--carried on not only before the adoption of the Constitution but for a dozen years after 1808 when the constitutional prohibition of that nefarious traffic went into effect--perfectly and completely shows. But Chief Justice Taney's simple statement of this historical fact was everywhere interpreted to be a part of his legal decision. This was natural enough under the circumstances for the reason that slavery itself, in behalf of which the decision seemed to have been rendered, rested solely upon the doctrine that a negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect.