ch, listening to
the arguments in the fatuous Somerset case, with higher light and
knowledge, suddenly awoke to the truth that by the laws of
England, a slave could not breathe on that soil, and he so
decided, and the negro was discharged. Slavery was abolished in
Massachusetts in the same way, without any amendment of her
constitution or new legislation, simply by the decision of her
Chief Justice. So you perceive, honorable gentlemen, we have two
precedents for the "short cut" we propose to liberty.

2d. Some object that it was not the "intention" of the framers of
the original Constitution, nor of the amendments, to enfranchise
woman. When ordinary men, in their ordinary condition, talk of
the "intentions" of great men specially inspired to utter great
political truths, they talk of what they can not know or
understand. When by some moral revolution men are cut loose from
all their old moorings and get beyond the public sentiment that
once bound them, with no immediate selfish interest to
subserve--as, for instance, our fathers in leaving England, or
the French Communes in the late war--in hardship and suffering
they dig down to the hard-pan of universal principles, and in
their highest inspirational moments proclaim justice, liberty,
equality for all.

Visiting Chicago not long since, I saw great pieces of rock of
the most wonderful mineral combination--gold, silver, glass,
iron, layer after layer, all welded beautifully together, and
that done in the conflagration of a single night which would have
taken ages of growth to accomplish in the ordinary rocky
formations. Just so revolutions in the moral world suddenly mould
ideas, clear, strong, grand, that centuries might have slumbered
over in silence; ideas that strike minds ready for them with the
quickness and vividness of the lightning's flash. It is in such
ways and under such conditions that constitutions and great
principles of jurisprudence are written; the letter and spirit
are ever on the side of liberty; and highly organized minds,
governed by principle, invariably give true interpretations;
while others, whose law is expediency, coarse and material in all
their conceptions, will interpret law, Bible, constitution,
everything, in harmony with the public sentiment of their c