Excerpt from The Law of Freedom and Bondage in the United States, Vol. 1 of 2 In the belief that this tendency arises principally from a want of precision in the definitions of law and in the formulas which express the basal propositions of jurisprudence, the follow ing examination of the laws of the United States affecting per sonal condition has been commenced by a preliminary exposition of those principles of general jurisprudence which would be necessarily involved in considering the incidents of free condition and its contraries in whatever country they might exist and it has been attempted at the same time to discriminate for use in the succeeding inquiry such terms, already adopted by writers of acknowledged reputation, as are requisite to express the neces sary distinctions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.