ne that in
some places people won't let you proclaim it? Is that the way to test the
truth of any doctrine? Why, I understood that at one time the people of
Chicago would not let Judge Douglas preach a certain favorite doctrine of
his. I commend to his consideration the question whether he takes that as
a test of the unsoundness of what he wanted to preach.

There is another thing to which I wish to ask attention for a little while
on this occasion. What has always been the evidence brought forward to
prove that the Republican party is a sectional party? The main one was
that in the Southern portion of the Union the people did not let the
Republicans proclaim their doctrines amongst them. That has been the main
evidence brought forward,--that they had no supporters, or substantially
none, in the Slave States. The South have not taken hold of our principles
as we announce them; nor does Judge Douglas now grapple with those
principles. We have a Republican State Platform, laid down in Springfield
in June last stating our position all the way through the questions before
the country. We are now far advanced in this canvass. Judge Douglas and
I have made perhaps forty speeches apiece, and we have now for the fifth
time met face to face in debate, and up to this day I have not found
either Judge Douglas or any friend of his taking hold of the Republican
platform, or laying his finger upon anything in it that is wrong. I ask
you all to recollect that. Judge Douglas turns away from the platform
of principles to the fact that he can find people somewhere who will not
allow us to announce those principles. If he had great confidence that our
principles were wrong, he would take hold of them and demonstrate them to
be wrong. But he does not do so. The only evidence he has of their being
wrong is in the fact that there are people who won't allow us to preach
them. I ask again, is that the way to test the soundness of a doctrine?

I ask his attention also to the fact that by the rule of nationality he is
himself fast becoming sectional. I ask his attention to the fact that his
speeches would not go as current now south of the Ohio River as they have
formerly gone there I ask his attention to the fact that he felicitates
himself to-day that all the Democrats of the free States are agreeing with
him, while he omits to tell us that the Democrats of any slave State agree
with him. If he has not thought of this, I commend to his consider