All civilized governments have statutes of limitations. Human welfare requires that claims which have long been voluntarily acquiesced in, should not be revived. Hence our laws bar a right of action, otherwise incontrovertible, after that tacit abandonment of which the mere lapse of time is proof. Personal rights are most generally abandoned by a six years’ neglect to enforce them. Even real estate may be held, by twenty years’ quiet possession, without other title. Crimes partake of this exemption. With the single exception of murder, all crimes are barred in Massachusetts by a six years’ delay to prosecute. But the Fugitive Slave act knows no mercy or compassion of this kind. Unrelentingly it fastens its clutch upon all cases. While life lasts, its fangs strike into the flesh. The alleged slave may have been amongst us for fifty years; he may have earned property, be married, and surrounded by children. It is all the same. The inexorable certificate of a commissioner remands him to bondage and despair. The act not only remands him to bondage, but, under circumstances to which there will be few exceptions, it orders that he be sent home at the public expense. The constitution says, he shall be “delivered up.” There the obligation of that instrument ceases. It is only the law that adds, he shall be _carried back_. You and I, sir, must help pay the costs of sending a fellow-being into bondage; when we are under no more constitutional obligation to do so, than to pay the expenses of a slave dealer who ships his cargoes direct from Africa. But the bill has become a law, and the practical question now is, how can the country be exculpated from the crime, and the dishonor. For myself, I do not adopt the doctrine of forcible nullification. I trust I shall never join a mob to resist a law, until I am ready for revolution. The only true and enduring remedy is repeal. Those who would forcibly resist the law, lose half their motive and impulse for repeal; for if we abolish it without repealing it, it will be likely to remain upon the statute book an eternal monument of the nation’s disgrace. Let effort never cease, until the jury trial be obtained. But this view of civil duty applies only to the _citizen_. It does not touch the fugitive. One liberty the slave always has,--whenever he deems it expedient, he may re-clothe himself in the rights which God and nature gave him, and which, though they may be ravished from him, can never be destroyed.