Auxiliary to all this, and working hand-in-hand with it, the Nebraska doctrine, or what is left of it, is to educate and mould public opinion not to care whether slavery is voted down or voted up.  This shows exactly where we now are, and partially, also, whither we are tending.

It will throw additional light on the latter, to go back, and run the mind over the string of historical facts already stated.  Several things will now appear less dark and mysterious than they did when they were transpiring.  The people were to be left “perfectly free,” “subject only to the Constitution.”  What the Constitution had to do with it, outsiders could not then see.  Plainly enough now:  it was an exactly fitted niche for the Dred Scott decision to afterwards come in, and declare the perfect freedom of the people to be just no freedom at all.  Why was the amendment expressly declaring the right of the people voted down?  Plainly enough now:  the adoption of it would have spoiled the niche for the Dred Scott decision.  Why was the Court decision held up?  Why even a Senator’s individual opinion withheld till after the presidential election?  Plainly enough now:  the speaking out then would have damaged the perfectly free argument upon which the election was to be carried.  Why the outgoing President’s felicitation on the indorsement?  Why the delay of a reargument?  Why the incoming President’s advance exhortation in favour of the decision?  These things look like the cautious patting and petting of a spirited horse, preparatory to mounting him, when it is dreaded that he may give the rider a fall.  And why the hasty after-indorsement of the decision by the President and others?

We cannot absolutely know that all these adaptations are the result of preconcert.  But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places, and by different workmen—­Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance (Douglas, Pierce, Taney, Buchanan),—­and when we see those timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few, not omitting even scaffolding—­or if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring such piece in,—­in such a case, we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft, drawn up before the first blow was struck.