you anything about How it was made, BY WHOM it was made, or that he
remembers it being made at all? Why does he stand playing upon the meaning
of words and quibbling around the edges of the evidence? If he can explain
all this, but leaves it unexplained, I have the right to infer that Judge
Douglas understood it was the purpose of his party, in engineering that
bill through, to make a constitution, and have Kansas come into the Union
with that constitution, without its being submitted to a vote of the
people. If he will explain his action on this question, by giving a
better reason for the facts that happened than he has done, it will be
satisfactory. But until he does that--until he gives a better or more
plausible reason than he has offered against the evidence in the case--I
suggest to him it will not avail him at all that he swells himself up,
takes on dignity, and calls people liars. Why, sir, there is not a word in
Trumbull's speech that depends on Trumbull's veracity at all. He has only
arrayed the evidence and told you what follows as a matter of reasoning.
There is not a statement in the whole speech that depends on Trumbull's
word. If you have ever studied geometry, you remember that by a course of
reasoning Euclid proves that all the angles in a triangle are equal to
two right angles. Euclid has shown you how to work it out. Now, if you
undertake to disprove that proposition, and to show that it is erroneous,
would you prove it to be false by calling Euclid a liar? They tell me that
my time is out, and therefore I close.

FIFTH JOINT DEBATE, AT GALESBURGH, OCTOBER 7, 1858

Mr. LINCOLN'S REPLY.

MY FELLOW-CITIZENS: A very large portion of the speech which Judge Douglas
has addressed to you has previously been delivered and put in print. I
do not mean that for a hit upon the Judge at all.---If I had not been
interrupted, I was going to say that such an answer as I was able to make
to a very large portion of it had already been more than once made and
published. There has been an opportunity afforded to the public to see
our respective views upon the topics discussed in a large portion of the
speech which he has just delivered. I make these remarks for the purpose
of excusing myself for not passing over the entire ground that the Judge
has traversed. I however desire to take up some of the points that he
has attended to, and ask your attention to them, and I shall follow him
backwards upon some notes whi