Once more: The act says the certificate “shall be conclusive of the right of the person or persons in whose favor granted, to remove such fugitive to the state or territory from which he escaped, and shall prevent all molestation of such person or persons, by any process issued by any court, judge, magistrate, or any other person whomsoever.” According to this, the certificate is a talisman which protects its holder against all law, all evidence, and all judicial power. A kidnapper may seize a free man in Boston, buy evidence that he owes this mysterious _debt of service_, obtain the requisite certificate against his victim, and then neither the mother who bore him, nor the elder brothers and sisters who grew up with him, nor the neighbors who have known him from his cradle, nor the minister who baptized him, can testify that he is free; nor can all the judges and courts in the commonwealth stop the man who is bearing away one of their fellow-citizens to a bondage worse than death, to inquire into his title. He is in a charmed circle that neither law nor justice can enter. Do you ask where is that old, time-honored writ of _habeas corpus_, for which martyrs have died and rivers of blood have flowed, and which the constitution declares SHALL NOT be suspended “unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it”? The answer is, that the writ of _habeas corpus_ is nothing but a “process issued” by a court, and the act declares that the holder of the certificate shall be exempt from all “molestation,” “by any process issued by any court.” In one word, the law contains a provision that its own constitutionality shall not be brought into question; at least, until its victim reaches the place of his bondage, and is beyond the reach of rescuing hands. Now, even if this act does not commit such gross infractions of the constitution that the courts will set it aside, yet it would seem as though no sane man could help seeing that it wars upon all our ideas of justice; that it repudiates and scorns all the great securities for freedom which wise and good men, for centuries past, have given their labors, and their lives, to establish; and that it converts the vast machinery of the social state, not into the means of protecting, but of assailing, the liberties of the citizen. As to the appointment of commissioners, it gives us none of the constitutional securities that improper men will not be invested with these high prerogatives against our dearest rights; and as to the manner in which evidence may be procured, it resembles the missives which the inquisition, in olden times, sent forth against heretics, to seize without law, to try without defence, and to punish without mercy or hope. It resembles the _lettres de cachet_, which, before the great revolution, the despots of France gave, _in blank_, to villain courtiers, and villain courtesans, to be filled up with the names of those persons whose perdition they would compass.