Meanwhile the hapless negro is the fruitful subject of reprisals in other quarters.  John Pettit, whom Tom Benton paid his respects to, you will recollect, calls the immortal Declaration “a self-evident lie”; while at the birthplace of freedom—­in the shadow of Bunker Hill and of the “cradle of liberty,” at the home of the Adamses and Warren and Otis—­Choate, from our side of the house, dares to fritter away the birthday promise of liberty by proclaiming the Declaration to be “a string of glittering generalities”; and the Southern Whigs, working hand in hand with proslavery Democrats, are making Choate’s theories practical.  Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, mindful of the moral element in slavery, solemnly declared that he trembled for his country when he remembered that God is just; while Judge Douglas, with an insignificant wave of the hand, “don’t care whether slavery is voted up or voted down.”  Now, if slavery is right, or even negative, he has a right to treat it in this trifling manner.  But if it is a moral and political wrong, as all Christendom considers it to be, how can he answer to God for this attempt to spread and fortify it? [Applause.]

But no man, and Judge Douglas no more than any other, can maintain a negative, or merely neutral, position on this question; and, accordingly, he avows that the Union was made by white men and for white men and their descendants.  As matter of fact, the first branch of the proposition is historically true; the government was made by white men, and they were and are the superior race.  This I admit.  But the corner-stone of the government, so to speak, was the declaration that “all men are created equal,” and all entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” [Applause.]

And not only so, but the framers of the Constitution were particular to keep out of that instrument the word “slave,” the reason being that slavery would ultimately come to an end, and they did not wish to have any reminder that in this free country human beings were ever prostituted to slavery. [Applause.] Nor is it any argument that we are superior and the negro inferior—­that he has but one talent while we have ten.  Let the negro possess the little he has in independence; if he has but one talent, he should be permitted to keep the little he has. [Applause:] But slavery will endure no test of reason or logic; and yet its advocates, like Douglas, use a sort of bastard logic, or noisy assumption it might better be termed, like the above, in order to prepare the mind for the gradual, but none the less certain, encroachments of the Moloch of slavery upon the fair domain of freedom.  But however much you may argue upon it, or smother it in soft phrase, slavery can only be maintained by force—­by violence.  The repeal of the Missouri Compromise was by violence.  It was a violation of both law and the sacred obligations of honor, to overthrow and trample under foot a solemn compromise, obtained by the fearful loss to freedom