fully sustained in the courts of all the slaveholding States,
although the act of emancipation may not be in the form required by
law in which the court sits.

"In all such cases, courts continually administer the law of the
country where the right was acquired; and when that law becomes known
to the court, it is just as much a matter of course to decide the
rights of the parties according to its requirements, as it is to
settle the title of real estate situated in our State by its own
laws."

This appears to me a most satisfactory answer to the argument of the
court. Chief Justice continues:

"The perfect equality of the different States lies at the foundation
of the Union. As the institution of slavery in the States is one over
which the Constitution of the United States gives no power to the
General Government, it is left to be adopted or rejected by the
several States, as they think best; nor can any one State, or number
of States, claim the right to interfere with any other State upon the
question of admitting or excluding this institution.

"A citizen of Missouri, who removes with his slave to Illinois, has
no right to complain that the fundamental law of that State to which
he removes, and in which he makes his residence, dissolves the
relation between him and his slave. It is as much his own voluntary
act, as if he had executed a deed of emancipation. No one can pretend
ignorance of this constitutional provision, and," he says, "the
decisions which have heretofore been made in this State, and in many
other slaveholding States, give effect to this and other similar
provisions, on the ground that the master, by making the free State
the residence of his slave, has submitted his right to the operation
of the law of such State; and this," he says, "is the same in law as a
regular deed of emancipation."

He adds:

"I regard the question as conclusively settled by repeated
adjudications of this court, and, if I doubted or denied the propriety
of those decisions, I would not feel myself any more at liberty to
overturn them, than I would any other series of decisions by which the
law of any other question was settled. There is with me," he says,
"nothing in the law relating to slavery which distinguishes it from
the law on any other subject, or allows any more accommodation to the
temporary public excitements which are gathered around it."

"In this State," he says, "it has been recognised from the beginning