ually enjoying that
equality, or yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them.
In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to
declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as
circumstances should permit.

"They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be
familiar to all,--constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even,
though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby
constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the
happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere."

There again are the sentiments I have expressed in regard to the
Declaration of Independence upon a former occasion,--sentiments which have
been put in print and read wherever anybody cared to know what so humble
an individual as myself chose to say in regard to it.

At Galesburgh, the other day, I said, in answer to Judge Douglas, that
three years ago there never had been a man, so far as I knew or believed,
in the whole world, who had said that the Declaration of Independence did
not include negroes in the term "all men." I reassert it to-day. I assert
that Judge Douglas and all his friends may search the whole records of the
country, and it will be a matter of great astonishment to me if they shall
be able to find that one human being three years ago had ever uttered the
astounding sentiment that the term "all men" in the Declaration did not
include the negro. Do not let me be misunderstood. I know that more than
three years ago there were men who, finding this assertion constantly in
the way of their schemes to bring about the ascendency and perpetuation
of slavery, denied the truth of it. I know that Mr. Calhoun and all the
politicians of his school denied the truth of the Declaration. I know
that it ran along in the mouth of some Southern men for a period of years,
ending at last in that shameful, though rather forcible, declaration of
Pettit of Indiana, upon the floor of the United States Senate, that the
Declaration of Independence was in that respect "a self-evident lie,"
rather than a self-evident truth. But I say, with a perfect knowledge of
all this hawking at the Declaration without directly attacking it, that
three years ago there never had lived a man who had ventured to assail it
in the sneaking way of pretending to believe it, and then asserting it did
not include the negro. I believe the f