Another point on the Washington act:  If it was intended to be modeled after the Utah and New Mexico acts, as Judge Douglas insists, why was it not inserted in it, as in them, that Washington was to come in with or without slavery as she may choose at the adoption of her constitution?  It has no such provision in it; and I defy the ingenuity of man to give a reason for the omission, other than that it was not intended to follow the Utah and New Mexico laws in regard to the question of slavery.

The Washington act not only differs vitally from the Utah and New Mexico acts, but the Nebraska act differs vitally from both.  By the latter act the people are left “perfectly free” to regulate their own domestic concerns, etc.; but in all the former, all their laws are to be submitted to Congress, and if disapproved are to be null.  The Washington act goes even further; it absolutely prohibits the territorial Legislature, by very strong and guarded language, from establishing banks or borrowing money on the faith of the Territory.  Is this the sacred right of self-government we hear vaunted so much?  No, sir; the Nebraska Bill finds no model in the acts of ’50 or the Washington act.  It finds no model in any law from Adam till to-day.  As Phillips says of Napoleon, the Nebraska act is grand, gloomy and peculiar, wrapped in the solitude of its own originality, without a model and without a shadow upon the earth.

In the course of his reply Senator Douglas remarked in substance that he had always considered this government was made for the white people and not for the negroes.  Why, in point of mere fact, I think so too.  But in this remark of the Judge there is a significance which I think is the key to the great mistake (if there is any such mistake) which he has made in this Nebraska measure.  It shows that the Judge has no very vivid impression that the negro is human, and consequently has no idea that there can be any moral question in legislating about him.  In his view the question of whether a new country shall be slave or free is a matter of as utter indifference as it is whether his neighbor shall plant his farm with tobacco or stock it with horned cattle.  Now, whether this view is right or wrong, it is very certain that the great mass of mankind take a totally different view.  They consider slavery a great moral wrong, and their feeling against it is not evanescent, but eternal.  It lies at the very foundation of their sense of justice, and it cannot be trifled with.  It is a great and durable element of popular action, and I think no statesman can safely disregard it.