of the judicial bench, and to the confidence of the people in the purity, integrity, and freedom from political bias of their decisions, that the judges should be exempt from all suspicion of party connection.  Lord Campbell even goes the length of saying, what was not urged on either side of either House in these debates, that it was alleged by at least one contemporary writer that Lord Mansfield’s position in the cabinet did perceptibly influence some of his views and measures respecting the Press;[157] and, though in both Houses the ministry had a majority on the question of the propriety of the appointment, he records his own opinion[158] that “the argument was all on the losing side;” and that Mr. Fox showed his consciousness that it was so by his “concession that the Chief-justice should absent himself from the cabinet when the expediency of commencing prosecutions for treason or sedition was to be discussed.”  He adds, also, that “it is said that Lord Ellenborough himself ere long changed his opinion, and, to his intimate friends, expressed deep regret that he had ever been prevailed upon to enter the cabinet.”

But, if the composition of the cabinet of 1806 has in this respect been generally condemned, on the other hand the annals of that ministry, short-lived as it was, are marked by the enactment of one great measure which has been stamped with universal approbation.  It may, perhaps, be said that the existence, promotion, discouragement, or suppression of a branch of trade has no title to be regarded as a constitutional question.  But the course which the British Parliament, after a long period of hesitation, has adopted respecting, not only the slave-trade, but the employment of slave-labor in any part of the British dominions, is so intimately connected with the great constitutional principle, that every man, whatever be his race or nation or previous condition, whose foot is once planted on British soil, is free from that moment, that it cannot be accounted a digression to mention the subject here.  To our statesmen of Queen Anne’s time traffic in slaves was so far from being considered discreditable, that the ministry of that reign prided themselves greatly on what was called the Assiento Treaty with Spain, by which they secured for the British merchants and ship-owners the privilege of supplying the West India Islands with several thousand slaves a year.  In 1748 the ministers of George II were equally jealous of the credit of renewing it.  It had even on one occasion been decided in the Court of Common Pleas that an action of trover could be maintained for a negro, “because negroes are heathens;” though Chief-justice Holt scouted the idea of being bound by a precedent which would put “a human being on the same footing as an ox or an ass,” and declared that “in England there was no such thing as a slave.”  Subsequent decisions, however, of two Lord Chancellors—­Lord Talbot and Lord Hardwicke—­were not wholly consistent with the doctrine thus laid down by Holt; and the