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, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to
interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.
I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do
so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between
the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between
the two which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living
together upon the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes
a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas,
am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I
have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding
all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to
all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the
right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as
much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he
is not my equal in many respects, certainly not in color, perhaps not
in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread,
without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my
equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.

Now I pass on to consider one or two more of these little follies.
The Judge is woefully at fault about his early friend Lincoln being a
"grocery-keeper." I don't know as it would be a great sin, if I had been;
but he is mistaken. Lincoln never kept a grocery anywhere in the world.
It is true that Lincoln did work the latter part