They are the two principles that have
stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to
struggle.

The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right
of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself.
It is the same spirit that says, "You toil and work and earn bread, and
I'll eat it." No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth
of a king, who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live
by the fruit of their labour, or from one race of men as an apology for
enslaving another race,--it is the same tyrannical principle....
Whenever the issue can be distinctly made, and all extraneous matter
thrown out, so that men can fairly see the real difference between the
parties, this controversy will soon be settled, and it will be done
peaceably, too. There will be no war, no violence. It will be placed
again where the wisest and best men of the world placed it.

_From a Speech at Columbus, Ohio, on the Slave Trade, Popular
Sovereignty, etc. September 16, 1859_

... The Republican party, as I understand its principles and policy,
believes that there is great danger of the institution of slavery being
spread out and extended, until it is ultimately made alike lawful in all
the States of this Union; so believing, to prevent that incidental and
ultimate consummation is the original and chief purpose of the
Republican organization.

I say "chief purpose" of the Republican organization; for it is
certainly true that if the national House shall fall into the hands of
the Republicans, they will have to attend to all the matters of national
house-keeping as well as this. The chief and real purpose of the
Republican party is eminently conservative. It proposes nothing save and
except to restore this Government to its original tone in regard to this
element of slavery, and there to maintain it, looking for no further
change in reference to it than that which the original framers of the
Government themselves expected and looked forward to.

The chief danger to this purpose of the Republican party is not just now
the revival of the African slave-trade, or the passage of a
Congressional slave-code ... but the most imminent danger that now
threatens that purpose is that insidious Douglas popular sovereignty.
This is the miner and sapper. While it does not propose to revive the
African slave-trade, nor to pass a slave-code, nor to make a seco