“I speak in the spirit of the British Law, which makes liberty commensurate with, and inseparable from, the British soil; which proclaims, even to the stranger and the sojourner, the moment he sets his foot upon British earth, that the ground on which he treads is holy, and consecrated by the genius of Universal Emancipation. No matter in what language his doom may have been pronounced; no matter what complexion, incompatible with freedom, an Indian or an African sun may have burnt upon him; no matter in what disastrous battle his liberty may have been cloven down; no matter with what solemnities he may have been devoted upon the altar of slavery; the first moment he touches the sacred soil of Britain, the altar and the god sink together in the dust; his soul walks abroad in her own majesty; his body swells beyond the measure of his chains, that burst from around him, and he stands redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled, by the irresistible genius of universal emancipation.” The name and labors of Granville Sharp have been overshadowed by those of other men, who reaped in the full, bright sunshine of success the harvest of popular admiration for the results of a philanthropic policy, of which Granville Sharp was the seed-sower. Zachary, Macaulay, Clarkson, Wilberforce, and Buxton are regarded as the leaders of the great movement that emancipated the slaves of Great Britain. Burke and Wilkes are remembered as the enlightened advocates of the Independence of America; and these great names throw a shadow over the Clerk in the Ordnance, who, with high-souled integrity, resigned his place, and gave up a calling that was his only profession and livelihood, rather than serve a government that waged a fratricidal war, and who, in defiance of the opinions of the Solicitor and Attorney-General, and of the Lord Chief-Justice, opposed by all the lawyers, and forsaken even by his own professional advisers, undertook to search the indices of a law library, to wade through an immense mass of dry and repulsive literature, and to make extracts from all the most important Acts of Parliament as he went along; until, at the very time that slaves were being sold by auction in Liverpool and London, and when he could not find a single lawyer who agreed with his opinion, he boldly exclaimed, “God be thanked! there is nothing in any English law or statute that can justify the enslaving of others.”