And acting upon this gratuitous presumption, we have sought, in
the words of the constitution, for some hidden meaning, which we could
imagine to have been understood, by the initiated, as referring to
slavery; or rather we have presumed its words to have been used as a
kind of cypher, which, among confederates in crime, (as we presume its
authors to have been,) was meant to stand for slavery. In this way, and
in this way only, we pretend to have discovered, in the clauses that
have been examined, a hidden, yet legal sanction of slavery. In the name
of all that is legal, who of us are safe, if our government, instead of
searching our constitution to find authorities for maintaining justice,
are to continue to busy themselves in such prying and microscopic
investigations, after such disguised and enigmatical authorities for
such wrongs as that of slavery, and their pretended discoveries are to
be adopted as law, which they are sworn to carry into execution?

The clauses mentioned, taken either separately or collectively, neither
assert, imply, sanction, recognize nor acknowledge any such thing as
slavery. They do not even speak of it. They make no allusion to it
whatever. They do not suggest, and, of themselves, never would have
suggested the idea of slavery. There is, in the whole instrument, no
such word as slave or slavery; nor any language that can legally be made
to assert or imply the existence of slavery. There is in it nothing
about color; nothing from which a liability to slavery can be predicated
of one person more than another; or from which such a liability can be
predicated of any person whatever. The clauses, that have been claimed
for slavery, are all, in themselves, honest in their language, honest in
their legal meaning; and they can be made otherwise only by such
gratuitous assumptions against natural right, and such straining of
words in favor of the wrong, as, if applied to other clauses, would
utterly destroy every principle of liberty and justice, and allow the
whole instrument to be perverted to every conceivable purpose of tyranny
and crime.

Let us now look at the _positive_ provisions of the constitution, _in
favor of liberty_, and see whether they are not only inconsistent with
any legal sanction of slavery, but also whether they must not, of
themselves, have necessarily extinguished slavery, if it had had any
constitutional existence to be extinguished.

And, first, the constitution made all