including farm-laborers.”  But why absurd?  Because persons engaged in free labor are, beyond question, free persons.  Not so those “bound to service.”  While so bound, apprentices may be considered not free; when the “term of years,” and with it the bondage to service, expires, they become free, or, as the common phrase is, “their own masters.”  It was necessary and proper, therefore, to specify whether, in the enumeration of inhabitants, they were to be estimated as free persons or as persons not free.

But would there be any fairness in construing this clause into an admission, by inference or otherwise, that an apprentice, while “bound to service,” is a slave?  Clearly not.  He is a person not free for the time, because another has a legal claim to his service or labor.  The Constitution admits this:  nothing more.

And so of slaves.  “Other persons” they are called, in contradistinction to “free persons”; therefore persons not free:  and properly so called, seeing that, like the apprentice before his term expires, they are “bound to service,” and that, unlike him, they remain thus bound for life.

But unless we admit that the apprentice, bound to service for a season, is a slave during that season, we cannot justly allege, that, by this provision of the Constitution, the negro, held to service or labor for life, is recognized as a slave.

A mere technical view of a great political question is usually a contracted one, of little practical value, and unbecoming a statesman.  “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”  Yet we must not mistake for technicality a careful interpretation, distinctly warranted by the terms employed, of a public instrument.  Every public instrument, by which the governed delegate powers to those who govern, should be strictly construed.

I am not arguing, that the men who framed the Constitution did not regard negroes held to service or labor as slaves.  I am not arguing that temporary claims, to the number (let us suppose) of forty or fifty thousand, may, for a moment, compare in importance with life-long claims, to the number of four millions; or that it is safe or proper to legislate in regard to the latter, involving as they do vast industrial interests, with as light consideration as might suffice in enacting regulations for the former.  I am not arguing that a political element, which has gradually assumed proportions so gigantic as has American Slavery, can, with any safety or propriety, be dealt with, except after the gravest deliberation and the most sedulous examination, in advance, of every step we propose to take.  I allege nothing of all this.