I was almost convinced; when it appeared one day that the right of
States to individual action was to cease in cases where a living
chattel was to escape from the South to the North.

[Illustration: SCHOOL.]

In this case the State, in violation of its own
laws unrecognizant of that kind of ownership, was to account for the
property and give it back, in obedience to general Congressional order
and to the most advanced principles of Centralization. Before I
had digested this pill another was administered to me in that
small English section of our circle which gave us much pride and an
occasional son-in-law. This was by no less a person than my dear old
friend Berkley, now grown a ruddy sexagenarian, but still given to
eating breakfast in his bath-tub. The wealthy Englishman, who had
got rich by exporting china ware, was sound on the subject of free
commerce between nations. That any industry, no matter how young might
be the nation practicing it, or how peculiar the difficulties of its
prosecution, should ever be the subject of home protection, he stamped
as a fallacy too absurd to be argued. The journals venturing such
an opinion were childish drivelers, putting forth views long since
exploded before the whole world. He was still loud in this opinion
when his little book of epigrams, _The Raven of Zurich and Other
Rhymes_, came out, and being bright and saucy was reprinted in
America. The knowledge that he could not tax on a foreign soil his own
ideas, the plastic pottery of his brain, was quite too much for
his mental balance, and he took to inveighing against free trade
in literary manufactures without the slightest perception of
inconsistency, and with all the warmth, if not the eloquence, of Mr.
Dickens on the same theme. The gradual accumulation of subjects like