first impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia,—­to their own native land.  But a moment’s reflection would convince me that whatever of high hope (as I think there is) there may be in this in the long term, its sudden execution is impossible.  If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days.  What then?  Free them all and keep them among us as underlings?  Is it quite certain that this betters their condition?  I think I would not hold one in slavery, at any rate; yet the point is not clear enough to me to denounce people upon.  What next?  Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals?  My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.  Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question, if, indeed, it is any part of it.  A universal feeling, whether well or ill founded, cannot be safely disregarded.  We cannot, then, make them equals.  It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted; but for their tardiness in this I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South.

“When they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them, not grudgingly, but fully and fairly; and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives, which should not, in its stringency, be more likely to carry a free man into slavery than Our ordinary criminal laws are to hang an innocent one.

“But all this, to my judgment, furnishes no more excuse for permitting slavery to go into our own free territory than it would for reviving the African slave-trade by law.  The law which forbids the bringing of slaves from Africa, and that which has so long forbid the taking of them to Nebraska, can hardly be distinguished on any moral principle; and the repeal of the former could find quite as plausible excuses as that of the latter.”

I have reason to know that Judge Douglas knows that I said this.  I think he has the answer here to one of the questions he put to me.  I do not mean to allow him to catechize me unless he pays back for it in kind.  I will not answer questions one after another, unless he reciprocates; but as he has made this inquiry, and I have answered it before, he has got it without my getting anything in return.  He has got my answer on the Fugitive Slave law.

Now, gentlemen, I don’t want to read at any greater length; but this is the true complexion of all I have ever said in regard to the institution of slavery and the black race.  This is the whole of it; and anything that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the negro is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse.  I will say here, while upon this