This man sticks to a decision which forbids the people of a Territory to exclude slavery, and he does so not because he says it is right in itself,—­he does not give any opinion on that,—­but because it has been decided by the Court, and, being decided by the Court, he is, and you are, bound to take it in your political action as law,—­not that he judges at all of its merits, but because a decision of the Court is to him a “Thus saith the Lord.”  He places it on that ground alone, and you will bear in mind that thus committing himself unreservedly to this decision, commits himself just as firmly to the next one as to this.  He did not commit himself on account of the merit or demerit of the decision, but it is a “Thus saith the Lord.”  The next decision as much as this will be a “Thus saith the Lord.”  There is nothing that can divert or turn him away from this decision.  It is nothing that I point out to him that his great prototype, General Jackson, did not believe in the binding force of decisions.  It is nothing to him that Jefferson did not so believe.  I have said that I have often heard him approve of Jackson’s course in disregarding the decision of the Supreme Court pronouncing a national bank constitutional.  He says I did not hear him say so.  He denies the accuracy of my recollection.  I say he ought to know better than I, but I will make no question about this thing, though it still seems to me that I heard him say it twenty times.  I will tell him, though, that he now claims to stand on the Cincinnati platform, which affirms that Congress cannot charter a national bank in the teeth of that old standing decision that Congress can charter a bank.  And I remind him of another piece of Illinois history on the question of respect for judicial decisions, and it is a piece of Illinois history belonging to a time when a large party to which Judge Douglas belonged, were displeased with a decision of the Supreme Court of Illinois, because they had decided that a Governor could not remove a secretary of State, and I know that Judge Douglas will not deny that he was then in favour of over-slaughing that decision, by the mode of adding five new Judges, so as to vote down the four old ones.  Not only so, but it ended in the Judge’s sitting down on the very bench as one of the five new judges to break down the four old ones.  It was in this way precisely that he got his title of Judge.  Now, when the Judge tells me that men appointed conditionally to sit as members of a Court will have to be catechized beforehand upon some subject, I say, “You know, Judge; you have tried it!” When he says a Court of this kind will lose the confidence of all men, will be prostituted and disgraced by such a proceeding, I say, “You know best, Judge; you have been through the mill.”