It exists, and can ONLY exist, through municipal regulations." So also declared the Supreme Court of Kentucky and numerous other tribunals.

This aspect of the subject furnished Sumner occasion for a masterly array of all the utterances in favor of liberty to be found in the Constitution, in the Declaration of Independence, in the constitutional conventions, in the principles of common law.

All these led up to and supported the one grand conclusion that, when Washington took the oath as President of the United States, "slavery existed nowhere on the national territory" and therefore "is in no respect a national institution." Apply the principles of the Constitution in their purity, then, and "in all national territories slavery will be impossible.

On the high seas, under the national flag, slavery will be impossible.

In the District of Columbia, slavery will instantly cease.