The decision of the slaveholding majority of the United States Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, an abstract of which we copied yesterday from The National Intelligencer, is stated to have been delivered in "a tone of voice almost inaudible." In this there was a high degree of adaptation. The utterance corresponded to the matter uttered. No wonder that the Chief Justice should have sunk his voice to a whisper, conscious, as he must have been, that the decision which he promulgated had been arrived at on grounds totally different from those indicated in the opinion -- that opinion being but a mere collation of false statements and shallow sophistries, got together to sustain a forgone conclusion -- knowing that he was engaged in a pitiful attempt to impose upon the public. However feeble his voice might have been, what he had to say was still feebler. There is not the slightest degree of adroitness, ingenuity or plausiblility about it. Downright and bare-faced falsehood is its main staple. Any slave-driving editor or Virginia bar-room politician could have taken the Chief-Justice's place on the bench, and with the exception of a little bolder speaking up, nobody would have perceived the difference.

The only point which can properly be considered as decided in this case is that a negro cannot sue in the United States Courts. That being so, Dred Scott had no right to be heard. Of course the Court had no occasion, and, having no occasion, they had no right -- at least, no right which would give their opinion any weight as authority -- to pronounce any judgment on his case. The opinions expressed by them are, therefore, merely oviter dicta -- indeed, they are hardly that. They are rather to be looked upon as a stump speech embodied into a judicial opinion, with the view of giving to it, by reason of the place of its delivery, a weight to which otherwise it would have no title.

The decision that no negro can sue in the Courts of the United States is based on the assumption that no negro can be a citizen of the United States. It is not pretended that the Constitution contains any direct exclusion of negroes from the rights of citizenship. That exclusion is merely a matter of inference. It is made to rest mainly upon an historical basis, made up of assumptions of pretended facts exterior to the Constitution -- assumptions, too, which show, on the part of the Judges concurring in this opinion, an impudent recklessness of truth and of their own reputation, hardly to have been expected, even at the bar, from any advocate, however unprincipled, of any case, however desperate. By way of illustrating this point, we will take the following specimen:

Such is the pretended historical basis for converting the Declaration of Independence into a declaration that negroes have no rights, set forth by a Court that cannot be supposed not to know that as early as 1705, Lord Holt had held that the law of England afforded no warrant for holding anybody in Slavery. and that as to this matter, negroes did not differ from other men -- a doctrine solemnly reiterated and forever established in the famous case of Somerset, three years previous to the Declaration of Independence. Much as this opinion presumes on the ignorance of the public, its authors can hardly be supposed to be themselves ignorant that similar views as to the rights of man were, at about the same time, promulgated by the legal tribunals of Scotland, France and Germany.

So far, indeed, from it being received at the time of the Declaration of Independence as "an axiom" that negroes had no rights, and that anybody might lawfully reduce them to bondage, it was precisely at that period that Christendom fully woke up to the idea that all men had the same natural rights, and that negro Slavery was no less a usurpation and an abuse than white Slavery. Nor is there any room to doubt that it was this very idea which the authors of the Declaration of Independence intended to embody in that document. The Court admits that the phraseology used "would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if used in an instrument at this day would be so understood," and the only objection offered to this interpretation is the following:

"They who framed the Declaration of Independence were men of too much honor, education and intelligence, to say what they did not believe; and they knew that in no part of the civilized world were the negro race, by common consent, admitted to the rights of freemen. They spoke and acted according to the practices, doctrines and usages of the day. That unfortunate race was supposed to be separate from the whites and was never thought or spoken of except as property."

Admit this alleged conformity to "the practices, doctrines and usages of the day," and the negroes will not be the only sufferers. In what part of the civilized world, we should like to know, was the equality of white men a matter of fact? The "self-evident truths" with the enunciation of which the Declaration of Independence sets out, were not put forward in that document as truths which had been practiced upon -- in which case no declaration of them would have been needed -- but as truths that ought to be practiced upon. Understood according to the system of interpretation propounded by our slaveholders' Judges, and the whole Declaration means -- nothing.

We come now to the second ground on which it is held that negroes cannot be citizens of the United States. The inhabitants of the United States, at the time they declared their Independence and assumed the powers of self-government, are represented by the Court as consisting of two classes -- white persons who alone are held to be included within the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, and negroes "supposed to be separate from the whites, and never thought of or spoken of except as property." Now it is undoubtedly true that at the time of the Declaration of Independence a large number of negroes were held as slaves -- just as a large number of whites were held as bond-servants for terms of years; but it is no less true that beside these negro slaves there was a considerable class of free negroes in all the colonies, who possessed most or all of the rights of other free persons, including in many of the colonies the elective franchise. It is, then, a manifest falsehood to assert that at the time of the Declaration of Independence negroes, as negroes, were looked upon as "unfit associates for the white race socially or politically;" as "having no rights which white men were bound to respect," and as "never being thought of or spoken of except as property." In a community entertaining such ideas, the existence of a free negro would have been impossible. The first Chief Justice Taney, or puisne-Justice Nelson, who met an emancipated negro on the highway, would have seized upon him as a slave, treating him in that respect like a stray horse or ox; and in case no owner appeared, would have claimed to come into lawful possession by finding. The very fact that there were in all the Colonies not only enslaved negroes, but free negroes, and that those free negroes were capable of holding property, of making contracts, of suing and being sued, and even of voting, upsets the whole argument of the Court upon this point. Those free negroes had just the same reasons for joining in the Declaration of Independence that the free whites had; nor were they thought unworthy to join with the whites in its support. Their services as soldiers were eagerly accepted -- by no State more eagerly than by Judge Taney's own State of Maryland -- and to the maintenance by arms of that Declaration they contributed their full quota. At the time of the adoption of the Federal Constitution, free negroes enjoyed in several of the States the rights of citizenship under the State Constitutions. In common with the other citizens of those States they became citizens of the United States, nor is any pretense found for excluding them from that privilege except in studied misrepresentation and down-right falsehood.

But even these misrepresentations and falsehoods afford no basis sufficient to sustain this decision. Take the Court's elaborate falsehoods as truths; grant that when the Constitution was framed nobody in Europe or America regarded negroes as men, and that, therefore, they could not have been thought of as citizens of the United States; grant all this, and it by no means follows that free negroes cannot sue in the Courts of the United States, which is the point decided. For a distinction is admitted by the Chief-Justice between citizens of particular States and citizens of the United States. Upon this point, the Court expresses itself as follows:

"Previous to the adoption of the Constitution, every State might confer the character of a citizen, and endow a man with all the rights pertaining to it. This was confined to the boundaries of a State, and gave him no rights beyond its limits. Nor have the several States surrendered this power by the adoption of the Constitution. Every State may confer the right upon an alien or on any other class or description of persons who would, to all intents and purposes, be a citizen of the State."

So far so good; but when the Court proceed to add, "but not a citizen in the sense used in the Constitution of the United States: he could not "therefore sue in any Court of the United States," they make an assertion for which they produce no warrant. If a distinction exists, as the Court alleges, between citizens of the respective States and citizens of the United States, that distinction must be supposed to be known to, and to be recognized by, the Constitution of the United States. But that Constitution in establishing the jurisdiction of the Federal Courts makes no mention of citizens of the United States, it speaks only of citizens of the States. Those Courts are to have jurisdiction in "controversies between citizens of different States." What is there in this clause to prevent a negro citizen of Massachusetts or New-York from sueing in the Federal Courts?

So much for the points actually decided. As to the other points upon which the Court gives an opinion, we shall have something to say on a future occasion. We will only add to-day that the views of Mr. Justice Curtis, as appears by the abstract of his dissenting opinion which we publish to-day, as to the citizenship of Africans, and also as to the non-judicial character of the parts of the judgment of the majority involving other questions, are substantially those which we have above presented; while Mr. Justice M'Lean fully bears out our construction of the Constitution, that free negroes, citizens of any of the States, would have a right to sue in the Federal Courts, even though it were conceded that they are not and cannot be citizens of the United States.