bill,--some ninety-three
thousand,--will you vote to admit them?

Q. 2. Can the people of a United States Territory, in any lawful way,
against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery
from its limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution?

Q. 3. If the Supreme Court of the United States shall decide that
States cannot exclude slavery from their limits, are you in favor of
acquiescing in, adopting, and following such decision as a rule of
political action?

Q. 4. Are you in favor of acquiring additional territory, in disregard
of how such acquisition may affect the nation on the slavery question?

As introductory to these interrogatories which Judge Douglas propounded
to me at Ottawa, he read a set of resolutions which he said Judge
Trumbull and myself had participated in adopting, in the first
Republican State Convention, held at Springfield, in October, 1854. He
insisted that I and Judge Trumbull, and perhaps the entire Republican
party, were responsible for the doctrines contained in the set of
resolutions which he read, and I understand that it was from that set
of resolutions that he deduced the interrogatories which he propounded
to me, using these resolutions as a sort of authority for propounding
those questions to me. Now I say here to-day that I do not answer his
interrogatories because of their springing at all from that set of
resolutions which he read. I answered them because Judge Douglas
thought fit to ask them. I do not now, nor ever did, recognize any
responsibility upon myself in that set of resolutions. When I replied
to him on that occasion, I assured him that I never had anything to do
with them. I repeat here to-day, that I never in any possible form had
anything to do with that set of resolutions. It turns out, I believe,
that those resolutions were never passed at any convention held in
Springfield. It turns out that they were never passed at any
convention or any public meeting that I had any part in. I believe it
turns out, in addition to all this, that there was not, in the fall of
1854, any convention holding a session in Springfield calling itself a
Republican State convention; yet it is true there was a convention, or
assemblage of men calling themselves a convention, at Springfield, that
did pass _some_ resolutions. But so little did I really know of the
proceedings of that convention, or what set of resolutions they had
passed, though having