Conventions. That "forever"
turned out to be just four years, when Judge Douglas himself reopened it.
When is it likely to come to an end? He introduced the Nebraska Bill in
1854 to put another end to the slavery agitation. He promised that it
would finish it all up immediately, and he has never made a speech
since, until he got into a quarrel with the President about the Lecompton
Constitution, in which he has not declared that we are just at the end of
the slavery agitation. But in one speech, I think last winter, he did
say that he did n't quite see when the end of the slavery agitation would
come. Now he tells us again that it is all over and the people of Kansas
have voted down the Lecompton Constitution. How is it over? That was only
one of the attempts at putting an end to the slavery agitation--one
of these "final settlements." Is Kansas in the Union? Has she formed
a constitution that she is likely to come in under? Is not the slavery
agitation still an open question in that Territory? Has the voting down
of that constitution put an end to all the trouble? Is that more likely to
settle it than every one of these previous attempts to settle the slavery
agitation? Now, at this day in the history of the world we can no more
foretell where the end of this slavery agitation will be than we can see
the end of the world itself. The Nebraska-Kansas Bill was introduced four
years and a half ago, and if the agitation is ever to come to an end we
may say we are four years and a half nearer the end. So, too, we can say
we are four years and a half nearer the end of the world, and we can
just as clearly see the end of the world as we can see the end of this
agitation. The Kansas settlement did not conclude it. If Kansas should
sink to-day, and leave a great vacant space in the earth's surface, this
vexed question would still be among us. I say, then, there is no way of
putting an end to the slavery agitation amongst us but to put it back upon
the basis where our fathers placed it; no way but to keep it out of our
new Territories,--to restrict it forever to the old States where it now
exists. Then the public mind will rest in the belief that it is in the
course of ultimate extinction. That is one way of putting an end to the
slavery agitation.

The other way is for us to surrender and let Judge Douglas and his friends
have their way and plant slavery over all the States; cease speaking of
it as in any way a wrong; regard slav