ushes everything that comes in its way, and
makes a [?]--or, as I read once, in a blackletter law book, "a slave is
a human being who is legally not a person but a thing." And if the
safeguards to liberty are broken down, as is now attempted, when they have
made things of all the free negroes, how long, think you, before they
will begin to make things of poor white men? [Applause.] Be not deceived.
Revolutions do not go backward. The founder of the Democratic party
declared that all men were created equal. His successor in the leadership
has written the word "white" before men, making it read "all white men are
created equal." Pray, will or may not the Know-Nothings, if they should
get in power, add the word "Protestant," making it read "all Protestant
white men...?"

Meanwhile the hapless negro is the fruitful subject of reprisals in other
quarters. John Pettit, whom Tom Benton paid his respects to, you will
recollect, calls the immortal Declaration "a self-evident lie"; while at
the birthplace of freedom--in the shadow of Bunker Hill and of the "cradle
of liberty," at the home of the Adamses and Warren and Otis--Choate,
from our side of the house, dares to fritter away the birthday promise
of liberty by proclaiming the Declaration to be "a string of glittering
generalities"; and the Southern Whigs, working hand in hand with
proslavery Democrats, are making Choate's theories practical. Thomas
Jefferson, a slaveholder, mindful of the moral element in slavery,
solemnly declared that he trembled for his country when he remembered that
God is just; while Judge Douglas, with an insignificant wave of the hand,
"don't care whether slavery is voted up or voted down." Now, if slavery
is right, or even negative, he has a right to treat it in this trifling
manner. But if it is a moral and political wrong, as all Christendom
considers it to be, how can he answer to God for this attempt to spread
and fortify it? [Applause.]

But no man, and Judge Douglas no more than any other, can maintain a
negative, or merely neutral, position on this question; and, accordingly,
he avows that the Union was made by white men and for white men and their
descendants. As matter of fact, the first branch of the proposition is
historically true; the government was made by white men, and they were
and are the superior race. This I admit. But the corner-stone of the
government, so to speak, was the declaration that "all men are created
equal," and all