Now, fellow-citizens, in regard to this matter about a contract between myself and Judge Trumbull, and myself and all that long portion of Judge Douglas’s speech on this subject.  I wish simply to say, what I have said to him before, that he cannot know whether it is true or not, and I do know that there is not a word of truth in it.  And I have told him so before.  I don’t want any harsh language indulged in, but I do not know how to deal with this persistent insisting on a story that I know to be utterly without truth.  It used to be the fashion amongst men that when a charge was made, some sort of proof was brought forward to establish it, and if no proof was found to exist, it was dropped.  I don’t know how to meet this kind of an argument.  I don’t want to have a fight with Judge Douglas, and I have no way of making an argument up into the consistency of a corn-cob and stopping his mouth with it.  All I can do is good-humouredly to say, that from the beginning to the end of all that story about a bargain between Judge Trumbull and myself, there is not a word of truth in it....

When that compromise [of 1850] was made, it did not repeal the old Missouri Compromise.  It left a region of United States territory half as large as the present territory of the United States, north of the line of 36 deg. 30’, in which slavery was prohibited by act of Congress.  This compromise did not repeal that one.  It did not affect nor propose to repeal it.  But at last it became Judge Douglas’s duty, as he thought (and I find no fault with him), as chairman of the Committee on Territories, to bring in a bill for the organization of a territorial government—­first of one, then of two Territories north of that line.  When he did so, it ended in his inserting a provision substantially repealing the Missouri Compromise.  That was because the Compromise of 1850 had not repealed it.  And now I ask why he could not have left that compromise alone?  We were quiet from the agitation of the slavery question.  We were making no fuss about it.  All had acquiesced in the compromise measures of 1850.  We never had been seriously disturbed by any Abolition agitation before that period....  I close this part of the discussion on my part by asking him the question again, Why, when we had peace under the Missouri Compromise, could you not have let it alone?

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He tries to persuade us that there must be a variety in the different institutions of the States of the Union; that that variety necessarily proceeds from the variety of soil, climate, of the face of the country, and the difference of the natural features of the States.  I agree to all that.  Have these very matters ever produced any difficulty amongst us?  Not at all.  Have we ever had any quarrel over the fact that they have laws in Louisiana designed to regulate the commerce that springs from the production of sugar, or because we have a different class relative to the production of flour in this State?  Have they produced any differences?  Not at all.  They are the very cements of this Union.  They don’t make the house a house divided against itself.  They are the props that hold up the house and sustain the Union.