Is it quite certain that this
betters their condition? I think I would not hold one in slavery, at any
rate; yet the point is not clear enough to me to denounce people upon.
What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals?
My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know
that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this
feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question,
if, indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill
founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot, then, make them equals.
It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted;
but for their tardiness in this I will not undertake to judge our brethren
of the South.

"When they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge
them, not grudgingly, but fully and fairly; and I would give them any
legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives, which should not, in
its stringency, be more likely to carry a free man into slavery than Our
ordinary criminal laws are to hang an innocent one.

"But all this, to my judgment, furnishes no more excuse for permitting
slavery to go into our own free territory than it would for reviving the
African slave-trade by law. The law which forbids the bringing of slaves
from Africa, and that which has so long forbid the taking of them to
Nebraska, can hardly be distinguished on any moral principle; and the
repeal of the former could find quite as plausible excuses as that of the
latter."

I have reason to know that Judge Douglas knows that I said this. I think
he has the answer here to one of the questions he put to me. I do not mean
to allow him to catechize me unless he pays back for it in kind. I will
not answer questions one after another, unless he reciprocates; but as
he has made this inquiry, and I have answered it before, he has got
it without my getting anything in return. He has got my answer on the
Fugitive Slave law.

Now, gentlemen, I don't want to read at any greater length; but this is
the true complexion of all I have ever said in regard to the institution
of slavery and the black race. This is the whole of it; and anything that
argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the
negro is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man
can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse. I will say here, while
upon this subject