NO LAPSE OF TIME CAN DEFEAT AN INTERPRETATION IN FAVOR OF LIBERTY.
Against this interpretation, so overpowering in reason and authority, it is no objection that thus far Slavery has prevailed. There is no statute of limitation and no prescription against the undying claims of Liberty. Rejected or neglected in one generation, they revive in another; nor can they be impaired by any desuetude. This objection was impotent to prevent Lord Mansfield from declaring that Slavery could not exist in England, although practically, under a false interpretation of the British Constitution, sustained by the professional opinions of Talbot and Yorke, and by the judgment of the latter on the bench, under the name of Lord Hardwicke, African slaves were sold in the streets of London, and advertised for sale in English papers, for a period full as long as that which has witnessed the false interpretation of our Constitution. As length of time did not prevail against a true interpretation of the British Constitution in the case of Somerset, it ought not to prevail against a true interpretation of our Constitution now.
There is no chemistry in time to transmute wrong into right. Therefore the whole question on the Constitution is still open, as on the day of its adoption. The cases of misinterpretation are of no value,—at least they cannot settle the question against Liberty. Such was the noble declaration of Charles James Fox in the British Parliament, when, in words strictly pertinent now, he said: “Wherever any usage appeared subversive of the Constitution, if it had lasted for one or for two hundred years, it was not a precedent, but an usurpation.”[331] And such is the character of every instance in which our Constitution has been perverted to sanction Slavery.