harp's book,
on the _Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery in
England_, while he was pleading; and in his address to the jury he spoke
and acted thus:--"I shall submit to you," says Mr. Dunning, "what my
ideas are upon such evidence, reserving to myself an opportunity of
discussing it more particularly, and reserving to myself a right to
insist upon a position, which I will maintain (and here he held up the
book to the notice of those present,) in any place and in any court of
the kingdom, that our laws admit of no such property[A]." The result of
the trial was, that the jury pronounced the plaintiff not to have been
the property of the defendant, several of them crying out, "No property,
no property."

[Footnote A: It is lamentable to think that the same Mr. Dunning, in a
cause of this kind, which came on afterwards, took the opposite side of
the question.]

After this one or two other trials came on, in which the oppressor was
defeated, and several cases occurred in which poor slaves were liberated
from the holds of vessels and other places of confinement, by the
exertions of Mr. Sharp. One of these cases was singular. The vessels on
board which a poor African had been dragged and confined, had reached
the Downs, and had actually got under weigh for the West Indies: in two
or three hours she would have been out of sight; but just at this
critical moment the writ of _habeas corpus_ was carried on board. The
officer who served it on the captain saw the miserable African chained
to the mainmast, bathed in tears, and casting a last mournful look on
the land of freedom, which was fast receding from his sight. The
captain, on receiving the writ, became outrageous; but knowing the
serious consequences of resisting the law of the land, he gave up his
prisoner, whom the officer carried safe, but now crying for joy, to the
shore.

But though the injured Africans, whose causes had been tried, escaped
slavery, and though many who had been forcibly carried into dungeons,
ready to be transported into the Colonies, had been delivered out of
them, Mr. Sharp was not easy in his mind: not one of the cases had yet
been pleaded on the broad ground, "Whether an African slave, coming into
England, became free?" This great question had been hitherto studiously
avoided; it was still, therefore, left in doubt. Mr. Sharp was almost
daily acting as if it had been determined, and as if he had been
following the known law of