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more dangerous to her peace than that of Rev. Mr. Torrey, now of the Maryland state prison, or the reverend accomplice, whose name we have forgotten, of Miss Delia Webster, or the veritable Miss Delia herself. She professes to regard the colored mariners, cooks and stew ards' on board Boston vessels, as emissaries, one and all, from the incendiary orators of Marlboro' Chapel; would her fears be less awakened by the approach, in proper person, of a whole legion from that Pandemonium? Plainly, if she can make good her position and chooses to avail herself of it, she would be in no want of a pretext for extending her prohibitory enactments to all or any of these characters. She may even go further and shut up her ports and fence around her frontiers against all abolitionists, and subject every citizen of a free state approaching her borders, to an examination as to the extent of his sympa thies with the peculiar institution on the one hand, or the victims of it on the other. This, in fact, we understand her to assert a right to do; and such too we take to be the meaning of Mr. Rhett when he declares that "the state has never surrendered her right to protect her citizens against incendiaries, black or white." Suppose then that South Carolina should enact, in the terms of her existing laws against free negroes, that it should not be lawful for any member of an anti-slavery association to enter the state, &c., and the sheriff should attempt to enforce the prohibition against Joshua Leavitt; does any man suppose that the state law would stand a moment, in the United States courts, as a defense to him against Mr. Leavitt's action of trespass for the illegal violence? The language of the court must be We can not regard the plaintiff in any other character than that of a citizen of Massachusetts; we can not look into his opinions nor his principles; the state law is plainly

a violation of the Constitution, and we can not go behind the enactment to ascertain the amount of inducement which the state may have had to make it; we must in all cases presume that the legislature of a state acted with a view to the good of its people, but we can not sit in judgment to determine the degree of necessity which can elevate into validity a law which the Constitution declares null and void.

There are, of course, numerous other dangers and necessities to which the guarantied rights of citi zens must per force give way, besides those growing out of southern slavery. Illustrations are at hand, but we do not care to dwell upon them. It is obvious that "an absolute positive right, pervading the Union with an equal and supreme force,” and yet at the mercy of the supposed necessities of the different states, is very little better than if it were at the mercy of their mere caprices. We can not, therefore, regard this last plea as presenting any ground of defense for South Carolina, distinct from those already considered, or as making any change in the constitutional aspect of the question. It still asserts a power to violate the supreme law; an assertion of power to which we do not object, so long as it is called by the right name and referred to the right origin.

To all these attempts, by force of police power or otherwise, to upset the Constitution, the quarantine and poor laws have furnished the no σr. It remains for us to consider how far they afford any analogy, which can supply to the defense set up for South Carolina legislation the want of positive argument, and whether their existence or operation raises any real difficulty adequate to prevent or even to hinder the reception of our doctrine.

We will take first, as presenting the stronger case, the quarantine laws. Under their operation, persons coming from countries or dis

tricts infected with disease, whether citizens or not, are forbidden to come on shore, and made to perform quarantine for the space of ten, twenty, or thirty days, or until it is sufficiently certain that they may be permitted to land without endangering the public health. The constitutionality of such laws has never been denied. If then a state, in providing for the public safety, may withhold from the citizens of other states, for so long a time as that safety in her opinion requires, the privilege of entering her territories, though that privilege is plainly granted by the Constitution, and her law to that effect stands as valid; will not the same principle give validity to the laws of the southern states, excluding free blacks from their territories, since their presence among the colored population is at all times a source of public danger? The assertion is, in other words, that a state law, in conflict with the Constitution, is valid notwithstanding such conflict, as a necessary exercise of the police power for the protection of the community; and it is claimed that the South Carolina. law and others like it, stand on the same ground. Now the whole force of the analogy, and it has at first sight great force, depends on the assumption, that the quarantine laws are in conflict with the Constitution, and are validated by the urgent necessity for their enactment; and this we deny. There is no kind of occasion for any resort to any extraordinary power or to any extreme right of self-protection, in explaining or justifying the operation of these laws. This is obvious enough, so far as they operate, as they may and do, upon the citizens of the state which enacts them; and a recurrence to principles already established proves the same fact with respect to their action on citizens of other states. We have shown, we think we may say have demonstrated, that the right of entrance into

any state of the Union, acquired by the citizens of each state, is precisely such a right, in its nature and extent, as that of the citizens of the state to re-enter it. We exhibited the high and sacred nature of that right, as growing out of the primary essential relations between the individual and the state, established upon the first principles of the common law and of natural reason, and recognized by our fundamental law adopting and affirming those principles. We showed it, in short, to be one of the absolute rights of men in their relation to government, as truly as their right to life, liberty or property. But we certainly do not mean by absolute rights, those of which the state, through its laws, may not regulate the exercise. On the contrary, with regard to them all, and to this among the rest, the ever-speaking language of the law is,-Sic utere tuo UT ALIENUM NON LEDAS. It acknowledges the rightthe tuum, even while speaking imperatively as to the manner of its enjoyment. It says to the absent citizen,-"Your right to return to your native state is sacred, and shall not be denied or withheld; but you have no right to exercise it in such a way as to make it injurious or dangerous to the lives or health of your fellow citizens; you have no right to bring with you into the streets of a crowded city and introduce among its inhabitants an infectious disease; and if there is any hazard that you may, you must submit to such restraints upon your right of entrance, to such regulations as to the time and manner of coming within the state, as the laws may justly prescribe in order to guard against such a hazard.” And such is its language to any other person, who approaches its shores, clothed by the compact and guaranty of the state with a "title to all privileges and immunities of citizens" in it. The right of entrance, undoubtedly conveyed under such a guaranty,

does not consist in an absolute power to do the outward act of crossing the state lines at any place, at any time, in any manner which he may choose, and under whatever circumstances; for it is a right defined and measured in its nature and extent by the similar right existing in the citizen, and his is not such a right. His right is defined and measured as to its nature and incidents, and particularly as to its liability to be affected by ordinary legislation, by the great principles of our fundamental laws, our constitutions and bills of rights; if the quarantine laws therefore, in their operation on the citizen of the state which enacts them, violate those principles and invade his rights under them, then the same laws operating under the same circumstances upon the citizens of other states, violate the constitutional guaranty, and illegally invade the rights which it is intended to convey and secure; and not otherwise.

The quarantine laws, therefore, do not conflict with the Constitution; certainly not with the controverted clause. And all parts of our expo. sition, in like manner, stand together. For that clause conveys to the citizens of each state an "absolute positive right and title to all privileges and immunities of citizens" in every other, which no state legislation "can qualify, regulate, control or restrain;" but the quarantine laws of any state regulate and restrain, not the right as conveyed by the Constitution, but as existing in its citizens; a right existing in them by an absolute title, but in its very nature subject to be regulated in the manner of its enjoyment; and conveyed, affected by the same incidents and liabilities, through the Constitution, to the citizens of other states. The simple right, and its incidents, taken together, make up the entire thing to which the Constitution gives an absolute title.

Such are the quarantine laws in

The rights of

theory, and such too in practice. The citizen of New York and the citizen of South Carolina, passengers on board the same ship from the Levant, or from a southern port during the sickly season, are subjected to the same detention. The one has no privilege or immunity which is not equally enjoyed by the other. In truth, they are not either of them denied an entrance into the state; they are received within its jurisdiction and brought under the protection of its laws, but their vessel is required to come to an anchorage at a specified place within the waters of the state, and they are required to continue a certain length of time on board the vessel. either as a citizen, by birth or adoption, are no more invaded than if, being in the interior of the state and found or suspected to have the small pox or plague, he should be taken to a public hospital or required to confine himself to a particular house and restrained from intercourse with the community at large, so far as might be necessary to prevent contagion. Laws of this description are in the strictest sense of the term police laws; as much so as those by virtue of which the local authorities draw a cordon sanitaire around an infected district, within the country. That they operate at the borders of the state, and in many, though not in most cases upon foreigners and strangers, is merely accidental, so far as their nature is concerned. They act on such persons, and all persons on whom they act at all, not as foreigners, but as inmates, just as truly as the laws for the punishment of crime. And it is for this reason that they are not considered as laws regulating commerce, though they act in general on the agents and instruments of commerce.

The analogy, supposed to exist between the two classes of laws, fails therefore at the very point at which the use to be made of it required it should be most clearly es

tablished. And not only so, but the explanations which we have given show a most important difference between them; a difference not accidental but essential; a difference in nature and kind, not merely in degree. The right of entrance into a state, we have shown, exists in the citizens of that and other states by an absolute title, but subject to be regulated in the manner of its exercise; now the quarantine law regulates the exercise, the law of exclusion denies the title. The one says-So enjoy your own right as not to injure another's; the other declares-You have henceforth no right at all. The one is properly a law of the state, purposing the good of the whole, while it recognizes and respects the rights of each; the other is an arbitrary exertion by the state of physical force upon persons whom it disowns as members, and refuses to treat even as men. Such a law, if it can be called one, directed by a state against its own citizens, is an act of detestable tyranny; directed against the citizens or subjects of a friendly nation, or any class of them, is an act of open hostility, unless justified as done in self-defense in view of urgent necessity; directed against the citizens of a sister state in our federal Union, it abjures the primary, essential covenant, on which that Union was formed and subsists, and violates the most solemn obligations which it imposes.

To bring our whole argument upon this subject to a practical test, let us suppose New York and South Carolina to be separate and independent states, the former having a law under which vessels and passengers

coming from the latter, during the sickly season, are detained in quarantine-say ten days. Suppose now that New York enacts a law to the effect, that the citizens of South Carolina shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citi zens in New York; no man would think of saying, that such a law would exempt the citizens of South Carolina from the operation of the quarantine law. Yet it must, if the two are in conflict; for of two laws, proceeding from the same authority, the provisions of which clash with each other, that which is last enacted repeals the other to the extent of the conflict. But if the last mentioned law had found in existence and force a previous enactment, to the effect that it should not be lawful for any citizen of South Carolina or any specified class of citizens, or any specified individual citizen of that state, to enter the state of New York, and subjecting any such citi. zen found in the state to arrest and imprisonment, there would be as little doubt that that enactment would be immediately repealed, and remain a dead letter upon the statute book, by the mere force of the grant of privileges. And if those privileges had been secured to the citizens of each state in the other, by a mutual convention between the two, the operation would be the same; except that the subsequent enforcing by New York of her preexisting law would be a gross violation of her faith pledged in the treaty, and a just cause of war.

*We are obliged with the consent of the author to postpone the remainder of of this article to next Number.-EDITOR.

ADDRESS OF THE HON. JOHN COTTON SMITH.

THE meeting of the Alumni of Yale College at the late commencement was addressed by the venerable Ex-Governor of Connecticut, John Cotton Smith, then upwards of eighty years of age. By request of the committee, Professors Silliman and Olmsted, he has furnished a copy for publication in the New Englander, as follows:

I meet you, my brethren, on the present occasion with no ordinary emotions. Those of us who received the honors of this venerable institution, more than sixty years ago, are permitted by a kind Providence to commune with our successors on this consecrated ground, an object of our early reverence, and endeared to us by many, very many precious recollections. But with what diminished numbers do we appear?

"Rari nantes in gurgite vasto." While we mourn the departure and cherish the memory of the great majority of our collegiate contemporaries, let us bless God that we still live, and that in His infinite goodness He has suffered us to live in a period of the world distinguished by signal displays of His power and beneficence-a period fruitful of events bearing with mighty influence on the happiness and hopes of mankind. Allow me to refer, for a few moments, to some of the incidents of our collegiate course. It occurred during the great contest for our national existence. We were not in a condition to engage in the hazards of the field, yet we were abundantly able to mark the progress of events with intense solicitude, and to participate in the alternations of hope and despair, as victory or defeat attended its operations. I have not unfrequently indulged myself in

drawing a parallel between the struggle of the country for independence, and ours for an education. In each case there was a lamentable deficiency of means for the prosecution of the enterprise. Were her soldiers poorly clad and as poorly fed? What was our clothing but principally the coarse fabrics of the domestic loom? And as to sustenance we were more than once, by the events of the war, dismissed and sent into the country for subsistence. Was she inadequately supplied with arms and military stores? We were also destitute, in a great measure, of the indispensable furniture of a col, lege; for instead of the splendid array we now behold, if we except an air-pump, the residue of our apparatus would be thought, at this day, better fitted to provoke merriment than to impart instruction. Should it then be asked how our country gained her independence, and we our degrees? Let it be answered, she triumphed through the blessing of heaven upon the invincible spirit of her sons, led by her Washington, "himself a host!" We prevailed by God's blessing on our indefatigable efforts, under the auspices of the venerated Stiles, himself, as he said of another, "a living, walking library." From his rich stores of erudition he poured instruction into our minds, while by the dignity and loveliness of his deportment, he took possession of our hearts. I love to think of him. I rejoice that his memory is embalmed in a volume which does honor alike to his name, and to our national literature. Although we had no resident professors, except one of theology, yet the deficiency was in a good degree supplied by tutors preeminently qualified for the station; two of whom, I am happy to

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