ere is very much in the principles that Judge
Douglas has here enunciated that I most cordially approve, and over
which I shall have no controversy with him. In so far as he insisted
that all the States have the right to do exactly as they please about
all their domestic relations, including that of slavery, I agree
entirely with him. He places me wrong in spite of all I tell him, though
I repeat it again and again, insisting that I have made no difference
with him upon this subject. I have made a great many speeches, some of
which have been printed, and it will be utterly impossible for him to
find anything that I have ever put in print contrary to what I now say
on the subject. I hold myself under constitutional obligations to allow
the people in all the States, without interference, direct or indirect,
to do exactly as they please, and I deny that I have any inclination to
interfere with them, even if there were no such constitutional
obligation. I can only say again that I am placed improperly--altogether
improperly, in spite of all that I can say--when it is insisted that I
entertain any other view or purpose in regard to that matter.

While I am upon this subject, I will make some answers briefly to
certain propositions that Judge Douglas has put. He says, "Why can't
this Union endure permanently half slave and half free?" I have said
that I supposed it could not, and I will try, before this new audience,
to give briefly some of the reasons for entertaining that opinion.
Another form of his question is, "Why can't we let it stand as our
fathers placed it?" That is the exact difficulty between us. I say that
Judge Douglas and his friends have changed it from the position in which
our fathers originally placed it.

I say in the way our fathers originally left the slavery question, the
institution was in the course of ultimate extinction. I say when this
government was first established, it was the policy of its founders to
prohibit the spread of slavery into the new Territories of the United
States where it had not existed. But Judge Douglas and his friends have
broken up that policy, and placed it upon a new basis, by which it is to
become national and perpetual. All I have asked or desired anywhere is
that it should be placed back again upon the basis that the fathers of
our government originally placed it upon. I have no doubt that it would
become extinct for all time to come, if we had but readopted the policy