Again, there is in that same quotation from the Nebraska bill this clause:  “it being the true intent and meaning of this bill not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State.”  I have always been puzzled to know what business the word “State” had in that connection.  Judge Douglas knows—­he put it there.  He knows what he put it there for.  We outsiders cannot say what he put it there for.  The law they were passing was not about States, and was not making provision for States.  What was it placed there for?  After seeing the Dred Scott decision, which holds that the people cannot exclude slavery from a Territory, if another Dred Scott decision shall come, holding that they cannot exclude it from a State, we shall discover that when the word was originally put there, it was in view of something that was to come in due time; we shall see that it was the other half of something.  I now say again, if there was any different reason for putting it there, Judge Douglas, in a good-humoured way, without calling anybody a liar, can tell what the reason was....

Now, my friends, ...  I ask the attention of the people here assembled, and elsewhere, to the course that Judge Douglas is pursuing every day as bearing upon this question of making slavery national.  Not going back to the records, but taking the speeches he makes, the speeches he made yesterday and the day before, and makes constantly, all over the country, I ask your attention to them.  In the first place, what is necessary to make the institution national?  Not war:  there is no danger that the people of Kentucky will shoulder their muskets and ... march into Illinois to force the blacks upon us.  There is no danger of our going over there, and making war upon them.  Then what is necessary for the nationalization of slavery?  It is simply the next Dred Scott decision.  It is merely for the Supreme Court to decide that no State under the Constitution can exclude it, just as they have already decided that under the Constitution neither Congress nor the territorial legislature can do it.  When that is decided and acquiesced in, the whole thing is done.  This being true and this being the way, as I think, that slavery is to be made national, let us consider what Judge Douglas is doing every day to that end.  In the first place, let us see what influence he is exerting on public sentiment.  In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything.  With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.  Consequently he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.  He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.  This must be borne in mind, as also the additional fact that Judge Douglas is a man of vast influence, so great that it is enough for many men to profess to believe anything when they once find out that Judge Douglas professes to believe it.  Consider also the attitude he occupies at the head of a large party,—­a party which he claims has a majority of all the voters in the country.