ter of King John, where it was promised as the security of freemen.
In connection with these twelve propositions, defining the legal status of the civil rights of these citizens, a momentary departure may be pardoned, to note that the three amendments to our Constitution first transplanted England's civil rights upon American soil, by the "law of the land," and that nowhere in judicial literature can a more profound or comprehensive interpretation of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments be found than in the brilliant eloquence with which the wandering, meteor- like genius of Curran nobly depicted the spirit of Anglo-Saxon liberty, when he exclaimed,—
"I speak in the spirit of the British law, which makes liberty commensurate with and inseparable from British soil; which proclaims, even to the stranger and sojourner the moment he sets foot upon British earth, that the ground on which he treads is holy, and is consecrated by the genius of Universal Emancipation. No matter in what language his doom may have been pronounced, no matter what complexion, incompatible with freedom, an Indian or an African sun may have burnt upon him, no matter in what disastrous battle his liberty may have been cloven down, no matter with what solemnities he may have been devoted upon the altar of slavery; the first moment he touches the sacred soil of Britain, the altar and the god sink together in the dust, his soul walks abroad in her own majesty, his body swells beyond the measure of his chains that burst from around him , and he stands redeemed, regenerated, disenthralled, by the irresistible genius of Universal Emancipation."
Well, indeed, after they had slept unhonored in a foreign land for a quarter of a century, might the awakened spirit of civil liberty bear the sacred remains of her loving son to their last resting-place, upon her own soil, where they now repose under a noble pile of granite.
