speech, which was a sort of declamation in reference to my having said that I entertained the belief that this government would not endure, half slave and half free.  I have said so, and I did not say it without what seemed to me good reasons.  It perhaps would require more time than I have now to set forth those reasons in detail; but let me ask you a few questions.  Have we ever had any peace on this slavery question?  When are we to have peace upon it if it is kept in the position it now occupies?  How are we ever to have peace upon it?  That is an important question.  To be sure, if we will all stop and allow Judge Douglas and his friends to march on in their present career until they plant the institution all over the nation, here and wherever else our flag waves, and we acquiesce in it, there will be peace.  But let me ask Judge Douglas how he is going to get the people to do that?  They have been wrangling over this question for forty years.  This was the cause of the agitation resulting in the Missouri Compromise; this produced the troubles at the annexation of Texas, in the acquisition of the territory acquired in the Mexican War.  Again, this was the trouble quieted by the Compromise of 1850, when it was settled “for ever,” as both the great political parties declared in their national conventions.  That “for ever” turned out to be just four years, when Judge Douglas himself reopened it.

When is it likely to come to an end?  He introduced the Nebraska bill in 1854, to put another end to the slavery agitation.  He promised that it would finish it all up immediately, and he has never made a speech since, until he got into a quarrel with the President about the Lecompton constitution, in which he has not declared that we are just at the end of the slavery agitation.  But in one speech, I think last winter, he did say that he didn’t quite see when the end of the slavery agitation would come.  Now he tells us again that it is all over, and the people of Kansas have voted down the Lecompton constitution.  How is it over?  That was only one of the attempts to put an end to the slavery agitation,—­one of these “final settlements.”  Is Kansas in the Union?  Has she formed a constitution that she is likely to come in under?  Is not the slavery agitation still an open question in that Territory?...  If Kansas should sink to-day, and leave a great vacant space in the earth’s surface, this vexed question would still be among us.  I say, then, there is no way of putting an end to the slavery agitation amongst us, but to put it back upon the basis where our fathers placed it; no way but to keep it out of our new Territories,—­to restrict it for ever to the old States where it now exists.  Then the public mind will rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction.  That is one way of putting an end to the slavery agitation.

The other way is for us to surrender, and let Judge Douglas and his friends have their way, and plant slavery over all the States,—­cease speaking of it as in any way a wrong—­regard slavery as one of the common matters of property, and speak of our negroes as we do of our horse and cattle.