lands of the continent, and keeping them from the settlement of free white labourers, who want the land to bring up their families upon; if they are in earnest,—­although they may make a mistake, they will grow restless, and the time will come when they will come back again and reorganize, if not by the same name, at least upon the same principles as their party now has.  It is better, then, to save the work while it is begun.  You have done the labour; maintain it, keep it.  If men choose to serve you, go with them; but as you have made up your organization upon principle, stand by it; for, as surely as God reigns over you, and has inspired your minds and given you a sense of propriety and continues to give you hope, so surely will you still cling to these ideas, and you will at last come back again after your wanderings, merely to do your work over again.

We were often,—­more than once, at least,—­in the course of Judge Douglas’s speech last night, reminded that this government was made for white men,—­that he believed it was made for white men.  Well, that is putting it into a shape in which no one wants to deny it; but the Judge then goes into his passion for drawing inferences that are not warranted.  I protest, now and for ever, against that counterfeit logic which presumes that, because I do not want a negro woman for a slave, I do necessarily want her for a wife.  My understanding is, that I need not have her for either; but, as God made us separate, we can leave one another alone, and do one another much good thereby.  There are white men enough to marry all the white women, and enough black men to marry all the black women; and in God’s name let them be so married.  The Judge regales us with the terrible enormities that take place by the mixture of races; that the inferior race bears the superior down.  Why, Judge, if we do not let them get together in the Territories, they won’t mix there.  I should say at least that that was a self-evident truth.

Now, it happens that we meet together once every year, somewhere about the 4th of July, for some reason or other.  These 4th of July gatherings, I suppose, have their uses.  If you will indulge me, I will state what I suppose to be some of them.

We are now a mighty nation:  we are thirty, or about thirty, millions of people, and we own and inhabit about one-fifteenth part of the dry land of the whole earth.  We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty-two years, and we discover that we were then a very small people in point of numbers, vastly inferior to what we are now, with a vastly less extent of country, with vastly less of everything we deem desirable among men.  We look upon the change as exceedingly advantageous to us and to our posterity, and we fix upon something that happened away back, as in some way or other being connected with this rise of prosperity.  We find a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men; they