While I am upon this subject, I will make some answers briefly to certain propositions that Judge Douglas has put.  He says, “Why can’t this Union endure permanently half slave and half free?” I have said that I supposed it could not, and I will try, before this new audience, to give briefly some of the reasons for entertaining that opinion.  Another form of his question is, “Why can’t we let it stand as our fathers placed it?” That is the exact difficulty between us.  I say that Judge Douglas and his friends have changed it from the position in which our fathers originally placed it.

I say in the way our fathers originally left the slavery question, the institution was in the course of ultimate extinction.  I say when this government was first established, it was the policy of its founders to prohibit the spread of slavery into the new Territories of the United States where it had not existed.  But Judge Douglas and his friends have broken up that policy, and placed it upon a new basis, by which it is to become national and perpetual.  All I have asked or desired anywhere is that it should be placed back again upon the basis that the fathers of our government originally placed it upon.  I have no doubt that it would become extinct for all time to come, if we had but readopted the policy of the fathers by restricting it to the limits it has already covered—­restricting it from the new Territories.

I do not wish to dwell on this branch of the subject at great length at this time, but allow me to repeat one thing that I have stated before.  Brooks, the man who assaulted Senator Sumner on the floor of the Senate, and who was complimented with dinners and silver pitchers and gold-headed canes, and a good many other things for that feat, in one of his speeches declared that when this government was originally established, nobody expected that the institution of slavery would last until this day.  That was but the opinion of one man, but it is such an opinion as we can never get from Judge Douglas or anybody in favour of slavery in the North at all.  You can sometimes get it from a Southern man.  He said at the same time that the framers of our government did not have the knowledge that experience has taught us—­that experience and the invention of the cotton gin have taught us that the perpetuation of slavery is a necessity.  He insisted therefore upon its being changed from the basis upon which the fathers of the government left it to the basis of perpetuation and nationalization.

I insist that this is the difference between Judge Douglas and myself—­that Judge Douglas is helping the change along.  I insist upon this government being placed where our fathers originally placed it.

...  When he asks me why we cannot get along with it [slavery] in the attitude where our fathers placed it, he had better clear up the evidences that he has himself changed it from that basis; that he has himself been chiefly instrumental in changing the policy of the fathers.  Any one who will read his speech of the twenty-second of March last, will see that he there makes an open confession, showing that he set about fixing the institution upon an altogether different set of principles....