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."

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.... Henry 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 nothing 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 the moral lights
around us. When he says he "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 h