The reader who carefully examines this speech will at once be impressed with the genius which immediately made Mr. Lincoln a power in American politics.  His grasp of the subject is so comprehensive, his statement so clear, his reasoning so convincing, his language so strong and eloquent by turns, that the wonderful power he manifested in the discussions and debates of the six succeeding years does not surpass, but only amplifies this, his first examination of the whole brood of questions relating to slavery precipitated upon the country by Douglas’s repeal.  After a searching history of the Missouri Compromise, he attacks the demoralizing effects and portentous consequences of its repeal.

“This declared indifference,” he says, “but, as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate.  I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself.  I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world; enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites; causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity; and especially because it forces so many good men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty, criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest....  Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature—­opposition to it in his love of justice.  These principles are an eternal antagonism, and when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.  Repeal the Missouri Compromise, repeal all compromises, repeal the Declaration of Independence, repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature.  It still will be the abundance of man’s heart that slavery extension is wrong, and out of the abundance of his heart his mouth will continue to speak.”

With argument as impetuous, and logic as inexorable, he disposes of Douglas’s plea of popular sovereignty: 

“Here, or at Washington, I would not trouble myself with the oyster laws of Virginia, or the cranberry laws of Indiana.  The doctrine of self-government is right—­absolutely and eternally right—­but it has no just application as here attempted.  Or perhaps I should rather say, that whether it has such application depends upon whether a negro is not or is a man.  If he is not a man, in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of self-government, do just what he pleases with him.  But if the negro is a man, is it not to that extent a total destruction of self-government to say that he too shall not govern himself?  When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—­that is despotism....  I particularly object to the new position which the avowed principle of this Nebraska