produced any
differences? Not at all. They are the very cements of this Union. They
don't make the house a house divided against itself. They are the props
that hold up the house and sustain the Union.

But has it been so with this element of slavery? Have we not always had
quarrels and difficulties over it? And when will we cease to have
quarrels over it? Like causes produce like effects. It is worth while to
observe that we have generally had comparative peace upon the slavery
question, and that there has been no cause for alarm until it was
excited by the effort to spread it into new territory. Whenever it has
been limited to its present bounds, and there has been no effort to
spread it, there has been peace. All the trouble and convulsion has
proceeded from efforts to spread it over more territory. It was thus at
the date of the Missouri Compromise. It was so again with the annexation
of Texas; so with the territory acquired by the Mexican War; and it is
so now. Whenever there has been an effort to spread it, there has been
agitation and resistance. Now, I appeal to this audience (very few of
whom are my political friends), as rational men, whether we have reason
to expect that the agitation in regard to this subject will cease while
the causes that tend to reproduce agitation are actively at work? Will
not the same cause that produced agitation in 1820, when the Missouri
Compromise was formed,--that which produced the agitation upon the
annexation of Texas, and at other times,--work out the same results
always? Do you think that the nature of man will be changed; that the
same causes that produced agitation at one time will not have the same
effect at another?

This has been the result so far as my observation of the slavery
question and my reading in history extend. What right have we then to
hope that the trouble will cease, that the agitation will come to an
end, until it shall either be placed back where it originally stood, and
where the fathers originally placed it, or, on the other hand, until it
shall entirely master all opposition? This is the view I entertain, and
this is the reason why I entertained it, as Judge Douglas has read from
my Springfield speech.

... At Freeport I answered several interrogatories that had been
propounded to me by Judge Douglas at the Ottawa meeting.... At the same
time I propounded four interrogatories to him, claiming it as a right
that he should answer as many for me as I