nstitution
makes provision that the owners of slaves shall have the right to reclaim
them. It gives the right to reclaim slaves; and that right is, as Judge
Douglas says, a barren right, unless there is legislation that will
enforce it.

The mere declaration, "No person held to service or labor in one State
under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any
law or regulation therein be discharged from such service or labor, but
shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor
may be due," is powerless without specific legislation to enforce it. Now,
on what ground would a member of Congress, who is opposed to slavery in
the abstract, vote for a Fugitive law, as I would deem it my duty to do?
Because there is a constitutional right which needs legislation to enforce
it. And although it is distasteful to me, I have sworn to support the
Constitution; and having so sworn, I cannot conceive that I do support
it if I withhold from that right any necessary legislation to make it
practical. And if that is true in regard to a Fugitive Slave law, is
the right to have fugitive slaves reclaimed any better fixed in the
Constitution than the right to hold slaves in the Territories? For this
decision is a just exposition of the Constitution, as Judge Douglas
thinks. Is the one right any better than the other? Is there any man who,
while a member of Congress, would give support to the one any more than
the other? If I wished to refuse to give legislative support to slave
property in the Territories, if a member of Congress, I could not do it,
holding the view that the Constitution establishes that right. If I did it
at all, it would be because I deny that this decision properly construes
the Constitution. But if I acknowledge, with Judge Douglas, that this
decision properly construes the Constitution, I cannot conceive that I
would be less than a perjured man if I should refuse in Congress to give
such protection to that property as in its nature it needed.

At the end of what I have said here I propose to give the Judge my fifth
interrogatory, which he may take and answer at his leisure. My fifth
interrogatory is this:

If the slaveholding citizens of a United States Territory should need
and demand Congressional legislation for the protection of their slave
property in such Territory, would you, as a member of Congress, vote for
or against such legislation?

[Judge DOUGLAS: Will yo