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Section II : Public and private property of the enemy -- Protection of persons, and especially of women, of religion, the arts and sciences -- Punishment of crimes against the inhabitants of hostile countries - Art. 42.
    Art. 42. Slavery, complicating and confounding the ideas of property, (that is of a ' thing ',) and of personality, (that is of ' humanity ',) exists according to municipal or local law only. The law of nature and nations has never acknowledged it. The digest of the Roman law enacts the early dictum of the pagan jurist, that "so far as the law of nature is concerned, all men are equal." Fugitives escaping from a country in which they were slaves, villains, or serfs, into another country, have, for centuries past, been held free and acknowledged free by judicial decisions of European countries, even though the municipal law of the country in which the slave had taken refuge acknowledged slavery within its own dominions.


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