To our statesmen of Queen Anne's time traffic in slaves was so far from being considered discreditable, that the ministry of that reign prided themselves greatly on what was called the Assiento Treaty with Spain, by which they secured for the British merchants and ship-owners the privilege of supplying the West India Islands with several thousand slaves a year.

In 1748 the ministers of George II were equally jealous of the credit of renewing it.

It had even on one occasion been decided in the Court of Common Pleas that an action of trover could be maintained for a negro, "because negroes are heathens;" though Chief-justice Holt scouted the idea of being bound by a precedent which would put "a human being on the same footing as an ox or an ass," and declared that "in England there was no such thing as a slave." Subsequent decisions, however, of two Lord Chancellors--Lord Talbot and Lord Hardwicke--were not wholly consistent with the doctrine thus laid down by Holt; and the question could not be regarded as finally settled till 1772, when a slave named Somersett was brought over to England from Jamaica by his master, and on his arrival in the Thames claimed his freedom, and under a writ of _habeas corpus_ had his claim allowed by Lord Mansfield.

The master's counsel contended that slavery was not a condition unsanctioned by English law, for villeinage was slavery, and no statute had ever abolished villeinage.

But the Chief-justice, in the first place, denied that villeinage had ever been slavery such as existed in the West Indies; and, in the second place, he pronounced that, whether it had been or not, it had, at all events, long ceased in England, and could not be revived.