her decision?  The power of each people to rule over their domestic affairs lies at the foundation of that Declaration of Independence to which you owe your existence among the nations of the earth; that declaration which led your fathers into and through the war of the revolution. It is that which constitutes to-day the doctrine of State-rights, upon which it is my pride and pleasure to stand. [Applause.] Congress has no power to determine what shall be property anywhere.  Congress has only such grants as are contained in the Constitution.  And the Constitution confers upon it no power to rule with despotic hand over the inhabitants of the Territories.  Within the limits of those Territories, the common property of the Union, you and I are equal; we are joint owners.  Each of us has the right to go into those Territories, with whatever property is recognized by the Constitution of the United States. [Applause.] Congress has no power to limit or abridge that right.  But the inhabitants of a Territory when as a people they come to form a State government, when they possess the power and jurisdiction which belongs to the people of New York, or any other State, have the right to decide that question, and no power upon earth has the right to decide it before that time. [Applause.]

[At this point the Young Men’s Democratic National Club, with banners and transparencies, entered the garden, and were received with enthusiastic cheers.]

The dull remarks, my friends, which I was in the course of making to you, have been interrupted by a beautiful episode, which I am sure will more than exceed the whole value of the poem, if I may thus characterize my dull speech.  And I am glad that foremost among all the transparencies and banners, comes this flag which speaks of the “Young Men’s Democratic National Club.”—­[Three cheers for Davis.] It is on the young men we must rely.  I have found that in every severe political struggle, where the contest on the one side was for principle, and on the other for spoils, it has been the gray-haired father and the boy with the peach bloom upon his cheek upon whom principles had to rely for support.  My own generation—­and I regret to say it—­seems too deeply steeped in the trickery of politics to be able to rise above the influence of personal and political gain into the pure field of patriotism.  And I am therefore glad to see the “Young Men’s Democratic National Club” leading this procession.

But to return to the argument I was making.  I said that Congress had no power to legislate upon what should be property anywhere; that Congress had no power to discriminate between the citizens of the different States who should go into the Territories, the common property of all the States, but that those Territories of right remained open to every citizen, and every species of property recognized in the Constitution, until the inhabitants should become a people, form a fundamental law for themselves, and, as authorized