[746] Professor Eugene Wambaugh, of the Law School of Harvard University, in a letter to the author, comments as follows on the source of the injustice wrought by the Fugitive Slave acts: "The difficulty lay in the initial assumption that a human being can be property. Grant this assumption, and there follow many absurdities, among them the impossibility of framing a Fugitive Slave Law that shall be both logical and humane. Human beings are entitled to a trial of the normal sort, especially in a case involving the liability of personal restraint. Chattels, however, are entitled to no trial at all; and if a chattel be lost or stolen, the owner may retake it wherever he finds it, provided he commits no breach of the peace. (3 Blackstone's _Commentaries_, 4.) If slaves had been treated as ordinary chattels, there could have been no trial as to the ownership of them, unless, indeed, there were a dispute between competing claimants. There would have been, however, the fatal objection that thus a free man--black, mulatto, or white--might be enslaved without a hearing. Here, then, is a puzzle. If the man is a slave, he is entitled to no trial at all. If he is free, he is entitled to a trial of the most careful sort, surrounded with all the safeguards that have been thrown up by the law. When there is such a dilemma, is it strange that there should be a compromise? The Fugitive Slave Laws really were a compromise; for in so far as they provided for an abnormal and incomplete trial, a hearing before a United States Commissioner, simply to determine rights as between the supposed slave and the supposed master, they conceded the radical impossibility of following out logically the supposition that human beings can be chattels, and, in so far as they denied to the supposed slave the normal trial, they assumed in advance that he was a slave. I need not write of the dilemma further. A procedure intermediate between a formal trial and a total denial of justice was probably the only solution practicable in those days; but it was an illogical solution, and the only logical solution was emancipation." [747] 5 _Sergeant and Rawle's Reports_, 63. See Appendix B, p. 368. [748] 14 _Wendell's Reports_, 514. See Appendix B, p. 368. [749] In the Circuit Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. 2 _Paine's Reports_, 352. [750] 2 _Western Law Journal_, 282. [751] Amendments, Article VII. [752] _Ibid._, Article V. [753] _12 Wendell's Reports_, 315-324.