common law.  The declaration of Lord Chief Justice Holt, that “by the common law, no man can have property in another,” is an acknowledged axiom, and based upon the well known common law definition of property.  “The subjects of dominion or property are things, as contra-distinguished from persons.”  Let Congress adopt the common law in the District of Columbia, and slavery there is at once abolished.  Congress may well be at home in common law legislation, for the common law is the grand element of the United States Constitution.  All its fundamental provisions are instinct with its spirit; and its existence, principles and paramount authority, are presupposed and assumed throughout the whole.  The preamble of the Constitution plants the standard of the Common Law immovably in its foreground.  “We, the people of the United States, in order to ESTABLISH JUSTICE, &c., do ordain and establish this Constitution;” thus proclaiming devotion to justice, as the controlling motive in the organization of the Government, and its secure establishment the chief object of its aims.  By this most solemn recognition, the common law, that grand legal embodiment of “justice” and fundamental right was made the groundwork of the Constitution, and intrenched behind its strongest munitions.  The second clause of Sec. 9, Art. 1; Sec. 4, Art. 2, and the last clause of Sec. 2, Art. 3, with Articles 7, 8, 9, and 13 of the Amendments, are also express recognitions of the common law as the presiding Genius of the Constitution.

By adopting the common law within its exclusive jurisdiction Congress would carry out the principles of our glorious Declaration, and follow the highest precedents in our national history and jurisprudence.  It is a political maxim as old as civil legislation, that laws should be strictly homogeneous with the principles of the government whose will they express, embodying and carrying them out—­being indeed the principles themselves, in preceptive form—­representatives alike of the nature and the power of the Government—­standing illustrations of its genius and spirit, while they proclaim and enforce its authority.  Who needs be told that slavery is in antagonism to the principles of the Declaration, and the spirit of the Constitution, and that these and the principles of the common law gravitate toward each other with irrepressible affinities, and mingle into one?  The common law came hither with our pilgrim fathers; it was their birthright, their panoply, their glory, and their song of rejoicing in the house of their pilgrimage.  It covered them in the day of their calamity, and their trust was under the shadow of its wings.  From the first settlement of the country, the genius of our institutions and our national spirit have claimed it as a common possession, and exulted in it with a common pride.  A century ago, Governor Pownall, one of the most eminent constitutional jurists of colonial times, said of the