ers and
ambitious Northern politicians. He thinks we want to get "his place," I
suppose. I agree that there are office-seekers amongst us. The Bible
says somewhere that we are desperately selfish. I think we would have
discovered that fact without the Bible. I do not claim that I am any less
so than the average of men, but I do claim that I am not more selfish than
Judge Douglas.

But is it true that all the difficulty and agitation we have in regard
to this institution of slavery spring from office-seeking, from the mere
ambition of politicians? Is that the truth? How many times have we had
danger from this question? Go back to the day of the Missouri Compromise.
Go back to the nullification question, at the bottom of which lay this
same slavery question. Go back to the time of the annexation of Texas.
Go back to the troubles that led to the Compromise of 1850. You will find
that every time, with the single exception of the Nullification question,
they sprung from an endeavor to spread this institution. There never was a
party in the history of this country, and there probably never will be, of
sufficient strength to disturb the general peace of the country. Parties
themselves may be divided and quarrel on minor questions, yet it extends
not beyond the parties themselves. But does not this question make a
disturbance outside of political circles? Does it not enter into the
churches and rend them asunder? What divided the great Methodist Church
into two parts, North and South? What has raised this constant disturbance
in every Presbyterian General Assembly that meets? What disturbed the
Unitarian Church in this very city two years ago? What has jarred and
shaken the great American Tract Society recently, not yet splitting it,
but sure to divide it in the end? Is it not this same mighty, deep-seated
power that somehow operates on the minds of men, exciting and stirring
them up in every avenue of society,--in politics, in religion, in
literature, in morals, in all the manifold relations of life? Is this the
work of politicians? Is that irresistible power, which for fifty years has
shaken the government and agitated the people, to be stifled and subdued
by pretending that it is an exceedingly simple thing, and we ought not to
talk about it? If you will get everybody else to stop talking about it,
I assure you I will quit before they have half done so. But where is
the philosophy or statesmanship which assumes that you can q