into the churches and rend them
asunder? What divided the great Methodist Church into two parts, North
and South? What has raised this constant disturbance in every
Presbyterian General Assembly that meets? What disturbed the Unitarian
Church in this very city two years ago? What has jarred and shaken the
great American Tract Society recently,--not yet splitting it, but sure
to divide it in the end? Is it not this same mighty, deep-seated power,
that somehow operates on the minds of men, exciting and stirring them up
in every avenue of society, in politics, in religion, in literature, in
morals, in all the manifold relations of life? Is this the work of
politicians? Is that irresistible power which for fifty years has shaken
the government and agitated the people, to be stilled and subdued by
pretending that it is an exceedingly simple thing, and we ought not to
talk about it? If you will get everybody else to stop talking about it,
I assure you that I will quit before they have half done so. But where
is the philosophy or statesmanship which assumes that you can quiet that
disturbing element in our society, which has disturbed us for more than
half a century, which has been the only serious danger that has
threatened our institutions? I say where is the philosophy or the
statesmanship, based on the assumption that we are to quit talking about
it, and that the public mind is all at once to cease being agitated by
it? Yet this is the policy here in the North that Douglas is
advocating,--that we are to care nothing about it! I ask you if it is
not a false philosophy? Is it not a false statesmanship that undertakes
to build up a system of policy upon the basis of caring nothing about
the very thing that everybody does care the most about,--a thing which
all experience has shown we care a very great deal about?

... The Judge alludes very often in the course of his remarks to the
exclusive right which the States have to decide the whole thing for
themselves. I agree with him very readily.... Our controversy with him
is in regard to the new Territories. We agree that when States come in
as States they have the right and power to do as they please.... We
profess constantly that we have no more inclination than belief in the
power of the government to disturb it; yet we are driven constantly to
defend ourselves from the assumption that we are warring upon the rights
of the States. What I insist upon is, that the new Territories