Popular sovereignty!  Everlasting popular sovereignty!  Let us for a moment inquire into this vast matter of popular sovereignty.  What is popular sovereignty?  We recollect that at an early period in the history of this struggle there was another name for the same thing,—­“squatter sovereignty.”  It was not exactly popular sovereignty, but squatter sovereignty.  What do those terms mean?  What do those terms mean when used now?  And vast credit is taken by our friend the Judge in regard to his support of it, when he declares the last years of his life have been, and all the future years of his life shall be, devoted to this matter of popular sovereignty.  What is it?  Why, it is the sovereignty of the people!  What was squatter sovereignty?  I suppose, if it had any significance at all, it was the right of the people to govern themselves, to be sovereign in their own affairs while they were squatted down in a country not their own, while they had squatted on a Territory that did not belong to them, in the sense that a State belongs to the people who inhabit it, when it belonged to the nation; such right to govern themselves was called “squatter sovereignty.”

Now, I wish you to mark:  What has become of that squatter sovereignty? what has become of it?  Can you get anybody to tell you now that the people of a Territory have any authority to govern themselves, in regard to this mooted question of slavery, before they form a State constitution?  No such thing at all; although there is a general running fire, and although there has been a hurrah made in every speech on that side, assuming that policy had given the people of a Territory the right to govern themselves upon this question, yet the point is dodged.  To-day it has been decided—­no more than a year ago it was decided—­by the Supreme Court of the United States, and is insisted upon to-day that the people of a Territory have no right to exclude slavery from a Territory; that if any one man chooses to take slaves into a Territory, all the rest of the people have no right to keep them out.  This being so, and this decision being made one of the points that the Judge approved, and one in the approval of which he says he means to keep me down,—­put me down I should not say, for I have never been up,—­he says he is in favor of it, and sticks to it, and expects to win his battle on that decision, which says that there is no such thing as squatter sovereignty, but that any one man may take slaves into a Territory, and all the other men in the Territory may be opposed to it, and yet by reason of the Constitution they cannot prohibit it.  When that is so, how much is left of this vast matter of squatter sovereignty, I should like to know?