Judge Douglas says he made a charge upon the editor of the Washington Union, alone, of entertaining a purpose to rob the States of their power to exclude slavery from their limits.  I undertake to say, and I make the direct issue, that he did not make his charge against the editor of the Union alone.  I will undertake to prove by the record here that he made that charge against more and higher dignitaries than the editor of the Washington Union.  I am quite aware that he was shirking and dodging around the form in which he put it, but I can make it manifest that he leveled his “fatal blow” against more persons than this Washington editor.  Will he dodge it now by alleging that I am trying to defend Mr. Buchanan against the charge?  Not at all.  Am I not making the same charge myself?  I am trying to show that you, Judge Douglas, are a witness on my side.  I am not defending Buchanan, and I will tell Judge Douglas that in my opinion, when he made that charge, he had an eye farther north than he has to-day.  He was then fighting against people who called him a Black Republican and an Abolitionist.  It is mixed all through his speech, and it is tolerably manifest that his eye was a great deal farther north than it is to-day.  The Judge says that though he made this charge, Toombs got up and declared there was not a man in the United States, except the editor of the Union, who was in favor of the doctrines put forth in that article.  And thereupon I understand that the Judge withdrew the charge.  Although he had taken extracts from the newspaper, and then from the Lecompton Constitution, to show the existence of a conspiracy to bring about a “fatal blow,” by which the States were to be deprived of the right of excluding slavery, it all went to pot as soon as Toombs got up and told him it was not true.  It reminds me of the story that John Phoenix, the California railroad surveyor, tells.  He says they started out from the Plaza to the Mission of Dolores.  They had two ways of determining distances.  One was by a chain and pins taken over the ground.  The other was by a “go-it-ometer,”—­an invention of his own,—­a three-legged instrument, with which he computed a series of triangles between the points.  At night he turned to the chain-man to ascertain what distance they had come, and found that by some mistake he had merely dragged the chain over the ground, without keeping any record.  By the “go-it-ometer,” he found he had made ten miles.  Being skeptical about this, he asked a drayman who was passing how far it was to the Plaza.  The drayman replied it was just half a mile; and the surveyor put it down in his book,—­just as Judge Douglas says, after he had made his calculations and computations, he took Toombs’s statement.  I have no doubt that after Judge Douglas had made his charge, he was as easily satisfied about its truth as the surveyor was of the drayman’s statement of the distance to the Plaza.  Yet it is a fact that the man who put forth all that matter which Douglas deemed a “fatal blow” at State sovereignty was elected by the Democrats as public printer.