you not commit perjury? I ask every sensible man
if that is not so? That is undoubtedly just so, say what you please. Now,
that is precisely what Judge Douglas says, that this is a constitutional
right. Does the Judge mean to say that the Territorial Legislature in
legislating may, by withholding necessary laws, or by passing unfriendly
laws, nullify that constitutional right? Does he mean to say that? Does he
mean to ignore the proposition so long and well established in law, that
what you cannot do directly, you cannot do indirectly? Does he mean that?
The truth about the matter is this: Judge Douglas has sung paeans to his
"Popular Sovereignty" doctrine until his Supreme Court, co-operating with
him, has squatted his Squatter Sovereignty out. But he will keep up this
species of humbuggery about Squatter Sovereignty. He has at last invented
this sort of do-nothing sovereignty,--that the people may exclude slavery
by a sort of "sovereignty" that is exercised by doing nothing at all. Is
not that running his Popular Sovereignty down awfully? Has it not got down
as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a
pigeon that had starved to death? But at last, when it is brought to the
test of close reasoning, there is not even that thin decoction of it left.
It is a presumption impossible in the domain of thought. It is precisely
no other than the putting of that most unphilosophical proposition, that
two bodies can occupy the same space at the same time. The Dred Scott
decision covers the whole ground, and while it occupies it, there is no
room even for the shadow of a starved pigeon to occupy the same ground.

Judge Douglas, in reply to what I have said about having upon a previous
occasion made the speech at Ottawa as the one he took an extract from at
Charleston, says it only shows that I practiced the deception twice. Now,
my friends, are any of you obtuse enough to swallow that? Judge Douglas
had said I had made a speech at Charleston that I would not make up north,
and I turned around and answered him by showing I had made that same
speech up north,--had made it at Ottawa; made it in his hearing; made
it in the Abolition District,--in Lovejoy's District,--in the personal
presence of Lovejoy himself,--in the same atmosphere exactly in which I
had made my Chicago speech, of which he complains so much.

Now, in relation to my not having said anything about the quotation from
the Chicago speech: he