ing due
to the constitutional guaranties thrown around it.

We oppose the Dred Scott decision in a certain way, upon which I ought
perhaps to address you in a few words. We do not propose that when Dred
Scott has been decided to be a slave by the court, we, as a mob, will
decide him to be free. We do not propose that, when any other one, or
one thousand, shall be decided by that court to be slaves, we will in
any violent way disturb the rights of property thus settled; but we
nevertheless do oppose that decision as a political rule, which shall be
binding on the voter to vote for nobody who thinks it wrong, which shall
be binding on the members of Congress or the President to favour no
measure that does not actually concur with the principles of that
decision. We do not propose to be bound by it as a political rule in
that way, because we think it lays the foundation not merely of
enlarging and spreading out what we consider an evil, but it lays the
foundation for spreading that evil into the States themselves. We
propose so resisting it as to have it reversed if we can, and a new
judicial rule established upon this subject.

I will add this, that if there be any man who does not believe that
slavery is wrong in the three aspects which I have mentioned, or in any
one of them, that man is misplaced and ought to leave us. While, on the
other hand, if there be any man in the Republican party who is impatient
over the necessity springing from its actual presence, and is impatient
of the constitutional guaranties thrown around it, and would act in
disregard of these, he too is misplaced, standing with us. He will find
his place somewhere else; for we have a due regard, so far as we are
capable of understanding them, for all these things. This, gentlemen, as
well as I can give it, is a plain statement of our principles in all
their enormity.

I will say now that there is a sentiment in the country contrary to
me--a sentiment which holds that slavery is not wrong, and therefore
goes for the policy that does not propose dealing with it as a wrong.
That policy is the Democratic policy, and that sentiment is the
Democratic sentiment. If there be a doubt in the mind of any one of this
vast audience that this is really the central idea of the Democratic
party, in relation to this subject, I ask him to bear with me while I
state a few things tending, as I think, to prove that proposition.

In the first place, the leading man,--I