inventor? Why, sir, the Vermont inventor protected by his own law
would come to Massachusetts, and there say to the pirate who had
stolen his property, "Render me up my property, or pay me value for
its use." The Senator from Vermont would receive for answer, if he
were the counsel of this Vermont inventor: "Sir, if you want
protection for your property go to your own State; property is
governed by the laws of the State within whose jurisdiction it is
found; you have no property in your invention outside of the limits
of your State; you cannot go an inch beyond it." Would not this be
so? Does not every man see at once that the right of the inventor
to his discovery, that the right of the poet to his inspiration,
depends upon those principles of eternal justice which God has
implanted in the heart of man; and that wherever he cannot exercise
them, it is because man, faithless to the trust that he has received
from God, denies them the protection to which they are entitled?

Sir, follow out the illustration which the Senator from Vermont
himself has given; take his very case of the Delaware owner of a
horse riding him across the line into Pennsylvania. The Senator
says, "Now you see that slaves are not property, like other
property; if slaves were property like other property, why have you
this special clause in your Constitution to protect a slave? You
have no clause to protect a horse, because horses are recognized as
property everywhere." Mr. President, the same fallacy lurks at the
bottom of this argument, as of all the rest. Let Pennsylvania
exercise her undoubted jurisdiction over persons and things within
her own boundary, let her do as she has a perfect right to
do--declare that hereafter, within the State of Pennsylvania, there
shall be no property in horses, and that no man shall maintain a
suit in her courts for the recovery of property in a horse, and
where will your horse owner be then? Just where the English poet is
now; just where the slaveholder and the inventor would be if the
Constitution, foreseeing a difference of opinion in relation to
rights in these subject-matters, had not provided the remedy in
relation to such property as might easily be plundered. Slaves, if
you please, are not property like other property in this, that you
can easily rob us of them; but as to the right in them, that man has
to overthrow the whole history of the world, he has to overthrow
every treatise on jurispruden