As he rose for his address Hardaker presented a manly, attractive figure and a vigorous, almost a magnetic, personality. Sweeping the court room with his eyes, he waited for a moment and then began with a couplet from a popular anti-slavery song, a song that had roused the echoes in thousands of enthusiastic gatherings, all over the North. No one within the reach of his voice needed any explanation of its meaning: “’Tis the law of God in the human soul, ’Tis the law in the Word Divine.” He quoted the injunction of the Mosaic law against the returning of an escaped servant and the commands of the New Testament for the succor of the oppressed, and in vivid language set them forth as the law of the Divine Word, the command of God, and therefore infinitely more binding upon men and women who believed in God and accepted the Bible as his Word than any law made by man in defiance of the Almighty’s command. In a voice that gave full value to its pathetic appeal he told the story of Mary Ellen’s heroic endeavor to escape from bondage and a fate “like unto the fires of hell.” Then he called upon the fathers and mothers of all young girls to tell him if the command of Christ, “Do unto others as you would that others do unto you,” had lost all its meaning, if humanity, Christianity, fatherhood--even ordinary manhood--no longer felt its force. Following the precedent set by a number of lawyers of wide reputation he analyzed the relation of the Fugitive Slave Act to the Constitution and concluded that it violated the rights guaranteed by the basic law of the country, and therefore, since it was unconstitutional, to disregard its provisions was not unlawful and his client had committed no crime. “This law was passed at the behest of the slave power,” he declared. “It was conceived in iniquity, the iniquity of the South’s determination to put upon slavery the seal of national approval; it was begotten in corruption, the corruption of compromise and bargain; and it was born in the dastardly willingness of misrepresentatives of the people to truckle to Southern arrogance and betray the convictions and the conscience of the North. “Shall we then, free men and women of Ohio, betrayed as we have been and misrepresented as we are by this so-called law, be expected to cast aside the commands of Christianity and the obligations of common brotherhood, transform ourselves into bloodhounds to chase the panting fugitive and send him back to his chains and, as in this case, to such a hell of lust and vice as all decent manhood and womanhood must shudder at? In the name of all that humanity holds sacred, I answer, no! A thousand times, no!