And any person who should in any way prevent the claimant or his agent or assistants from getting possession of the fugitive, by hiding him or helping him to escape, or by open opposition to his would-be captor,--such offender was to be fined _one thousand dollars_ for violating this _righteous_ law; and be liable to pay another _thousand dollars_ to the claimant of the fugitive. In order that every facility should be afforded to _our slaveholding brethren_ to retake their fleeing property, many commissioners were ordered to be appointed in all suitable places (in addition to the courts and judges) whose especial duty it should be to attend to cases that might arise under the Fugitive Slave Law. And each commissioner or judge, who found the accused guilty of having fled from bondage, was to receive a fee of ten dollars. But if the proof adduced by the claimant did not satisfy him that the accused was a fugitive from his service, then the judge or commissioner was to receive only five dollars. Thus bribery was by this law superadded to every other device to enable the American slaveholder to recover his escaped slave, and return him or her to a still more cruel bondage. Nor was this all that was atrociously wicked in the enactment. It provided further that, while the claimant or his agent might give testimony or make affidavit to the enslavement of the arrested one, “in no trial or hearing under the Act was the testimony of the alleged fugitive to be admitted in evidence” that he was not the one that his claimant called him, or that he had been emancipated by the will of a former owner, or by the purchase of his liberty. If there be among the laws of any other nation, in any other part and in any other age of the world, an enactment, a decree, a ukase, so profoundly wicked, so ingeniously cruel, as this law which the Congress of the United States passed in 1850,--the very middle of the nineteenth century,--I beg to be informed of it, for I confess at the close of this recital I feel as if, in my shame and misery, I should be relieved for a moment by bad company.