The passengers of the Underground Railroad had but one real refuge, one region alone within whose bounds they could know they were safe from reënslavement; that region was Canada. The position of Canada on the slavery question was peculiar, for the imperial act abolishing slavery throughout the colonies of England was not passed until 1833; and, legally, if not actually, slavery existed in Canada until that year. The importation of slaves into this northern country had been tolerated by the French, and later, under an act passed in 1790, had been encouraged by the English. It is a singular fact that while this measure was in force slaves escaped from their Canadian masters to the United States, where they found freedom.[551] Before the separation of the Upper and Lower Provinces in 1791, slavery had spread westward into Upper Canada, and a few hundred negroes and some Pawnee Indians were to be found in bondage through the small scattered settlements of the Niagara, Home and Western districts. [551] "A case of this kind," says Dr. S. G. Howe, "was related to us by Mrs. Amy Martin. She says: "My father's name was James Ford.... He ... would be over one hundred years old, if he were now living.... He was held here (in Canada) by the Indians as a slave, and sold, I think he said, to a British officer, who was a very cruel master, and he escaped from him, and came to Ohio, ... to Cleveland, I believe, first, and made his way from there to Erie (Pa.), where he settled.... When we were in Erie, we moved a little way out of the village, and our house was ... a station of the U. G. R. R." _The Refugees from Slavery in Canada West_, by S. G. Howe, 1864, pp. 8, 9. The Province of Upper Canada took the initiative in the restriction of slavery. In the year 1793, in which Congress provided for the rendition by the Northern states of fugitives from labor, the first parliament of Upper Canada enacted a law against the importation of slaves, and incorporated in it a clause to the effect that children of slaves then held were to become free at the age of twenty-five years.[552] Nevertheless, judicial rather than legislative action terminated slavery in Lower Canada, for a series of three fugitive slave cases occurred between the first day of February, 1798, and the last day of February, 1800. The third of these suits, known as the Robin case, was tried before the full Court of King's Bench, and the court ordered the discharge of the fugitive from his confinement. Perhaps the correctness of the decisions rendered in these cases may be questioned; but it is noteworthy that the provincial legislature would not cross them, and it may therefore be asserted that slavery really ceased in Lower Canada after the decision of the Robin case, February 18, 1800.[553] [552] Act of 30th Geo. III. [553] See the article entitled "Slavery in Canada," by J. C. Hamilton, LL.B., in the _Magazine of American History_, Vol. XXV, pp. 233-236.