Ladies and gentlemen:—­There is very much in the principles that Judge Douglas has here enunciated that I most cordially approve, and over which I shall have no controversy with him.  In so far as he has insisted that all the States have the right to do exactly as they please about all their domestic relations, including that of slavery, I agree entirely with him.  He places me wrong in spite of all I can tell him, though I repeat it again and again, insisting that I have no difference with him upon this subject.  I have made a great many speeches, some of which have been printed, and it will be utterly impossible for him to find anything that I have ever put in print contrary to what I now say upon this subject.  I hold myself under constitutional obligations to allow the people in all the States, without interference, direct or indirect, to do exactly as they please; and I deny that I have any inclination to interfere with them, even if there were no such constitutional obligation.  I can only say again that I am placed improperly—­altogether improperly, in spite of all I can say—­when it is insisted that I entertain any other view or purposes in regard to that matter.

While I am upon this subject, I will make some answers briefly to certain propositions that Judge Douglas has put.  He says, “Why can’t this Union endure permanently half slave and half free?” I have said that I supposed it could not, and I will try, before this new audience, to give briefly some of the reasons for entertaining that opinion.  Another form of his question is, “Why can’t we let it stand as our fathers placed it?” That is the exact difficulty between us.  I say that Judge Douglas and his friends have changed it from the position in which our fathers originally placed it.  I say, in the way our father’s originally left the slavery question, the institution was in the course of ultimate extinction, and the public mind rested in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction.  I say when this government was first established it was the policy of its founders to prohibit the spread of slavery into the new Territories of the United States, where it had not existed.  But Judge Douglas and his friends have broken up that policy, and placed it upon a new basis, by which it is to become national and perpetual.  All I have asked or desired anywhere is that it should be placed back again upon the basis that the fathers of our government originally placed it upon.  I have no doubt that it would become extinct, for all time to come, if we but readopted the policy of the fathers, by restricting it to the limits it has already covered, restricting it from the new Territories.