But has it been so with this element of slavery?  Have we not always had quarrels and difficulties over it?  And when will we cease to have quarrels over it?  Like causes produce like effects.  It is worth while to observe that we have generally had comparative peace upon the slavery question, and that there has been no cause for alarm until it was excited by the effort to spread it into new territory.  Whenever it has been limited to its present bounds, and there has been no effort to spread it, there has been peace.  All the trouble and convulsion has proceeded from efforts to spread it over more territory.  It was thus at the date of the Missouri Compromise.  It was so again with the annexation of Texas; so with the territory acquired by the Mexican War; and it is so now.  Whenever there has been an effort to spread it, there has been agitation and resistance.  Now, I appeal to this audience (very few of whom are my political friends), as rational men, whether we have reason to expect that the agitation in regard to this subject will cease while the causes that tend to reproduce agitation are actively at work?  Will not the same cause that produced agitation in 1820, when the Missouri Compromise was formed,—­that which produced the agitation upon the annexation of Texas, and at other times,—­work out the same results always?  Do you think that the nature of man will be changed; that the same causes that produced agitation at one time will not have the same effect at another?

This has been the result so far as my observation of the slavery question and my reading in history extend.  What right have we then to hope that the trouble will cease, that the agitation will come to an end, until it shall either be placed back where it originally stood, and where the fathers originally placed it, or, on the other hand, until it shall entirely master all opposition?  This is the view I entertain, and this is the reason why I entertained it, as Judge Douglas has read from my Springfield speech.

...  At Freeport I answered several interrogatories that had been propounded to me by Judge Douglas at the Ottawa meeting....  At the same time I propounded four interrogatories to him, claiming it as a right that he should answer as many for me as I did for him, and I would reserve myself for a future instalment when I got them ready.  The Judge, in answering me upon that occasion, put in what I suppose he intends as answers to all four of my interrogatories.  The first one of these I have before me, and it is in these words: 

Question 1. If the people of Kansas shall by means entirely unobjectionable in all other respects, adopt a State constitution and ask admission into the Union under it, before they have the requisite number of inhabitants according to the English bill—­some 93,000—­will you vote to admit them?

As I read the Judge’s answer in the newspaper, and as I remember it as pronounced at the time, he