this thing, though it still seems to me that I heard him say it twenty times. I will tell him, though, that he now claims to stand on the Cincinnati platform, which affirms that Congress cannot charter a national bank in the teeth of that old standing decision that Congress can charter a bank. And I remind him of another piece of Illinois history on the question of respect for judicial decisions, ... belonging to a time when a large party to which Judge Douglas belonged, were displeased with a decision of the Supreme Court of Illinois, . . . and I know that Judge Douglas will not deny that he was then in favour of overslaughing that decision, by the mode of adding five new Judges, so as to vote down the four old Not only so, but it ended in the Judge's sitting down on the very bench as one of the five new judges to break down the four old ones. It was in this way precisely that he got his title of Judge. Now, when the Judge tells me that men appointed conditionally to sit as members of a Court will have to be catechised beforehand upon some subject, I say, 'You know, Judge; you have tried it!' When he says a Court of this kind will lose the confidence of all men, will be prostituted and disgraced by such a proceeding, I say, 'You know best, Judge; you have been through the mill.'

ones.

"But I cannot shake Judge Douglas's teeth loose from the Dred Scott decision. Like some obstinate animal (I mean no disrespect) that will hang on when he has once got his teeth fixed you may cut off a leg, or you may tear away an arm, still he will not relax his hold. And so I may point out to the Judge, and say that he is bespattered all over, from the beginning of his political life to the present time, with attacks upon judicial decisions, I may cut off limb after limb of his public record, and strive to wrench from him a single dictum of the Court, yet I cannot divert him from it. He hangs to the last to the Dred Scott decision. Clay, my beau ideal of a statesman, . ..once said of a class of men who would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, that they must, if they would do this, go back to the era of our independence, and muzzle the cannon that thunders its annual joyous return; that they must blow out the moral lights around us; they must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate there the love of liberty; and then, and not till then, could they perpetuate slavery in this country! To my thinking, Judge Douglas is, by his example and vast influence, doing that very thing in this community when he says that the negro has noth

Henry

ing in the Declaration of Independence. Henry Clay plainly understood the contrary. Judge Douglas is going back to the era of our Revolution, and, to the extent of his ability, muzzling the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return. When he invites any people, willing to have slavery, to establish it, he is blowing out When he says he

the moral lights around us. 'cares not whether slavery is voted down or voted up,'-that it is a sacred right of self-government, he is, in my judgment, penetrating the human soul and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty in this American people. And now I will only say, that when, by all these means and appliances, Judge Douglas shall succeed in bringing public sentiment to an exact accordance with his own views; when these vast assemblages shall echo back all these sentiments; when they shall come to repeat his views and avow his principles, and to say all that he says on these mighty questions, then it needs only the formality of a second Dred Scott decision, which he indorses in advance, to make slavery alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.”

FROM THE DEBATE AT FREEPORT, ILLINOIS. August 27, 1858.

[NOTE. Mr. Lincoln had often said that the answer of Judge Douglas to his question whether under the Dred Scott decision the people of a Territory could exclude slavery from it before a State constitution was formed, would ruin his prospects as a candidate for the presidency. If he answered that they could, it would ruin him at the South; if he said they could not, it would destroy his prospects in the free States. It was the opinion of Elihu B. Washburne, in whose district the Freeport meeting was held, that his answers to this and other questions of Mr. Lincoln "sounded the political death-knell of Judge Douglas." His answer was that in his opinion "the people of a Territory can, by lawful means, exclude slavery from their limits prior to the formation of a State constitution." This answer, which denied the effect of the Dred Scott decision, as claimed by the Democracy of the South, wrought the ruin predicted for it. This fact gives a greater importance to the meeting at Freeport than to all the meetings subsequently held.

In his opening speech at Freeport, Mr. Lincoln made direct answers to the seven questions which Judge Douglas had put to him at Ottawa, with such explanations as served to make his answers more full and explicit. His four questions to

Judge Douglas involved the decision in the Dred Scott case, and required him to answer whether he would vote to admit Kansas without waiting for the number of inhabitants required by the English bill; whether the people of a Territory could in any lawful way exclude slavery from its limits; whether if the Supreme Court should decide that a State could not exclude slavery, he would acquiesce in and follow such decision as a rule of political action; and whether he was in favour of acquiring additional territory, in disregard of how such acquisition would affect the slavery question. Then, after correcting some erroneous statements of fact made by his adversary, he said: -]

66 I have been in the habit of charging, as a matter of belief on my part, that, in the introduction of the Nebraska Bill into Congress, there was a conspiracy to make slavery perpetual and national. I have arranged, from time to time, the evidence which establishes and proves the truth of this charge. I recurred to this charge at Ottawa. I shall not now have time to dwell upon it at any great length; but inasmuch as Judge Douglas, in his reply of half an hour, made some points upon me in relation to it, I propose noticing a few of them.

"The Judge insists that in the first speech I made, in which I very distinctly made that charge,