Now all this is manifestly unfair; yet I do not mention it to complain of it, in so far as it is already settled.  It is in the Constitution, and I do not for that cause, or any other cause, propose to destroy, or alter, or disregard the Constitution.  I stand to it, fairly, fully, and firmly.

But when I am told I must leave it altogether to other people to say whether new partners are to be bred up and brought into the firm, on the same degrading terms against me, I respectfully demur.  I insist that whether I shall be a whole man or only the half of one, in comparison with others is a question in which I am somewhat concerned, and one which no other man can have a sacred right of deciding for me.  If I am wrong in this, if it really be a sacred right of self-government in the man who shall go to Nebraska to decide whether he will be the equal of me or the double of me, then, after he shall have exercised that right, and thereby shall have reduced me to a still smaller fraction of a man than I already am, I should like for some gentleman, deeply skilled in the mysteries of sacred rights, to provide himself with a microscope, and peep about, and find out, if he can, what has become of my sacred rights.  They will surely be too small for detection with the naked eye.

Finally, I insist that if there is anything which it is the duty of the whole people to never intrust to any hands but their own, that thing is the preservation and perpetuity of their own liberties and institutions.  And if they shall think as I do, that the extension of slavery endangers them more than any or all other causes, how recreant to themselves if they submit The question, and with it the fate of their country, to a mere handful of men bent only on seif-interest.  If this question of slavery extension were an insignificant one, one having no power to do harm—­it might be shuffled aside in this way; and being, as it is, the great Behemoth of danger, shall the strong grip of the nation be loosened upon him, to intrust him to the hands of such feeble keepers?

I have done with this mighty argument of self-government.  Go, sacred thing!  Go in peace.

But Nebraska is urged as a great Union-saving measure.  Well, I too go for saving the Union.  Much as I hate slavery, I would consent to the extension of it rather than see the Union dissolved, just as I would consent to any great evil to avoid a greater one.  But when I go to Union-saving, I must believe, at least, that the means I employ have some adaptation to the end.  To my mind, Nebraska has no such adaptation.

“It hath no relish of salvation in it.”

It is an aggravation, rather, of the only one thing which ever endangers the Union.  When it came upon us, all was peace and quiet.  The nation was looking to the forming of new bends of union, and a long course of peace and prosperity seemed to lie before us.  In the whole range of possibility, there scarcely appears to me to have been anything out of which the slavery agitation could have been revived, except the very project of repealing the Missouri Compromise.  Every inch of territory we owned already had a definite settlement of the slavery question, by which all parties were pledged to abide.  Indeed, there was no uninhabited country on the continent which we could acquire, if we except some extreme northern regions which are wholly out of the question.