But these preliminary points appear of small moment when we come to consider the plea, if it be worthy of that name, which the counsel for the defendant opposed to the suit of the plaintiff. The bond is admitted, the penalty is confessed, the pound of flesh is forfeited, the bosom of Antonio is bared to the knife--when this brief but brief-less barrister, this skylarking young judge of Belmont steps jauntily forward, with a most preposterous quibble on her lips, and manages by an adroit subtlety to defeat the judgment to which the plaintiff is legally entitled. She awards the flesh, fibres, nerves, adipose matter, in controversy, to Shylock; but declares his life and fortune confiscate if he sheds a drop of blood, or takes more or less than the exact pound.
Now if there be one principle of law better settled than another (and probably it was as clearly set forth in the Revised Statutes of Venice as is set forth in our own common law), it is that a party entitled to the possession of a commodity, whether grain, guano, dead or live men's flesh, bones and sinews, is entitled, also, to pursue the usual necessary and appropriate means of obtaining the possession of the same. I appeal to Colonel W---- if this be not good law, and asking whether, if he be entitled to a dinner, he has not a right to seize upon it, whenever or however he can find it; whether, if a man owes him a bottle of champagne, he has not the right to break the neck of the bottle if a corkscrew is not convenient? So, to use a drier example, the sale of standing timber entitles the purchaser to enter the land upon which it is situated, and to cut down and carry off his own property. On the same principle, if A sells B a house and lot, entirely surrounded by other land owned by A, B has clearly a right of way to his own wife and fireside over A's land. (2 Blackstone 1149.) A hundred examples might be given in point, but it would be insulting the dignity of this court to argue at length a theory so transparently clear. If the shedding of a few drops of blood, more or less, was incidental and necessary to the rights of the plaintiff, if the article of personal property, forfeited to him on the bond, could be obtained in no other way, then, according to all the principles of law and common sense, he _had_ a right to spill those drops, more or less; and that, too, without legal risk.