othing can fail; without it, nothing
can succeed. Consequently, he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper
than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes
and decisions possible or impossible to be executed. This must be borne
in mind, as also the additional fact that Judge Douglas is a man of vast
influence, so great that it is enough for many men to profess to believe
anything when they once find out Judge Douglas professes to believe it.
Consider also the attitude he occupies at the head of a large party,--a
party which he claims has a majority of all the voters in the country.
This man sticks to a decision which forbids the people of a Territory
from excluding slavery, and he does so, not because he says it is right
in itself,--he does not give any opinion on that,--but because it has been
decided by 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 w