u propose to improve the condition of things by
enlarging slavery?--by spreading it out and making it bigger? You
may have a wen or cancer upon your person, and not be able to cut
it out lest you bleed, to death; but surely it is no way to cure
it to ingraft it and spread it over your whole body--that is no
proper way of treating what you regard a wrong. This peaceful way
of dealing with it as a wrong--restricting the spread of it, and
not allowing it to go into new countries where it has not already
existed--that is the peaceful way, the old-fashioned way, the way
in which the fathers themselves set us the example. Is slavery
wrong? That is the real issue. That is the issue that will
continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas
and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between
these two principles--right and wrong--throughout the world. They
are two principles that have stood face to face from the
beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is
the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of
kings. It is the same principle, in whatever shape it develops
itself. It is the same spirit that says: 'You work, and toil, and
earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes,
whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people
of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from
one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is
the same tyrannical principle.

On still another occasion he used these unmistakable words:

My declarations upon this subject of negro slavery may be
misrepresented, but cannot be misunderstood. I have said that I
do not understand the Declaration to mean that all men were
created equal in all respects. They are not our equal in color.
But I suppose that it does mean to declare that all men are
created equal in some respects; they are equal in their right to
'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' Certainly the
negro is not our equal in color, perhaps not in many other
respects; still, _in the right to put into his mouth the bread
that his own hands have earned, he is the equal of every other
man, white or black_.

It is not in the scope of this narrative to print extended quotations
from the speeches made i