the court; and being decided by the court, he is, and you are,
bound to take it in your political action as law, not that he judges at
all of its merits, but because a decision of the court is to him a "Thus
saith the Lord." He places it on that ground alone; and you will bear in
mind that thus committing himself unreservedly to this decision commits
him to the next one just as firmly as to this. He did not commit himself
on account of the merit or demerit of the decision, but it is a "Thus
saith the Lord." The next decision, as much as this, will be a "Thus saith
the Lord." There is nothing that can divert or turn him away from this
decision. It is nothing that I point out to him that his great prototype,
General Jackson, did not believe in the binding force of decisions. It is
nothing to him that Jefferson did not so believe. I have said that I have
often heard him approve of Jackson's course in disregarding the decision
of the Supreme Court pronouncing a National Bank constitutional. He says I
did not hear him say so. He denies the accuracy of my recollection. I say
he ought to know better than I, but I will make no question about this
thing, though it still seems to me that I heard him say it twenty times.
I will tell him, though, that he now claims to stand on the Cincinnati
platform, which affirms that Congress cannot charter a National Bank, in
the teeth of that old standing decision that Congress can charter a bank.
And I remind him of another piece of history on the question of respect
for judicial decisions, and it is a piece of Illinois history belonging
to a time when the large party to which Judge Douglas belonged were
displeased with a decision of the Supreme Court of Illinois, because they
had decided that a Governor could not remove a Secretary of State. You
will find the whole story in Ford's History of Illinois, and I know that
Judge Douglas will not deny that he was then in favor of over-slaughing
that decision by the mode of adding five new judges, so as to vote down
the four old ones. Not only so, but it ended in the Judge's sitting down
on that very bench as one of the five new judges to break down the four
old ones It was in this way precisely that he got his title of judge. Now,
when the Judge tells me that men appointed conditionally to sit as members
of a court will have to be catechized beforehand upon some subject, I say,
"You know, Judge; you have tried it." When he says a court of this kind
w