hich 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
will lose the confidence of all men, will be prostituted and disgraced by
such a proceeding, I say, "You know best, Judge; you have been through the
mill." But I cannot shake Judge Douglas's teeth loose from the Dred Scott
decision. Like some obstinate animal (I mean no disrespect) that will hang
on when he has once got his teeth fixed, you may cut off a leg, or you may
tear away an arm, still he will not relax his hold. And so I may point out
to the Judge, and say that he is bespattered all over, from the beginning
of his political life to the present time, with attacks upon judicial
decisions; I may cut off limb after limb of his public record, and strive
to wrench him from a single dictum of the court,--yet I cannot divert him
from it. He hangs, to the last, to the Dred Scott decision. These things
show there is a purpose strong as death and eternity for which he adheres
to this decision, and for which he will adhere to all other decisions of
the same court.

[A HIBERNIAN: "Give us something besides Dred Scott."]

Yes; no doubt you want to hear something that don't hurt. Now, having
spoken of the Dred Scott decision, one more word, and I am done. Henry
Clay, my beau-ideal of a statesman, the man for whom I fought all my
humble life, Henry Clay once said of a class of men who would repress all
tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation that they must, if they
would do this, go back to the era of our Independence, and muzzle the
cannon which thunders its annual joyous return; they must blow out the
moral lights around us; they must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate
there the love of libe