st joining the cry. They have him in his prison
house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with
him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him;
and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of hundred keys,
which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key--the keys
in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to hundred
different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention,
in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the
impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.

It is grossly incorrect to say or assume that the public estimate of the
negro is more favorable now than it was at the origin of the government.

Three years and a half ago, Judge Douglas brought forward his famous
Nebraska Bill. The country was at once in a blaze. He scorned all
opposition, and carried it through Congress. Since then he has seen
himself superseded in a Presidential nomination by one indorsing the
general doctrine of his measure, but at the same time standing clear
of the odium of its untimely agitation and its gross breach of national
faith; and he has seen that successful rival constitutionally elected, not
by the strength of friends, but by the division of adversaries, being in
a popular minority of nearly four hundred thousand votes. He has seen his
chief aids in his own State, Shields and Richardson, politically speaking,
successively tried, convicted, and executed for an offence not their own
but his. And now he sees his own case standing next on the docket for
trial.

There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people at the
idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races; and
Judge Douglas evidently is basing his chief hope upon the chances of his
being able to appropriate the benefit of this disgust to himself. If he
can, by much drumming and repeating, fasten the odium of that idea upon
his adversaries, he thinks he can struggle through the storm. He therefore
clings to this hope, as a drowning man to the last plank. He makes an
occasion for lugging it in from the opposition to the Dred Scott decision.
He finds the Republicans insisting that the Declaration of Independence
includes all men, black as well as white, and forthwith he boldly denies
that it includes negroes at all, and proceeds to argue gravely that all
who contend it does, do so only because the