to all the trouble?  Is that more likely to settle it than every one of these previous attempts to settle the slavery agitation?  Now, at this day in the history of the world we can no more foretell where the end of this slavery agitation will be than we can see the end of the world itself.  The Nebraska-Kansas Bill was introduced four years and a half ago, and if the agitation is ever to come to an end we may say we are four years and a half nearer the end.  So, too, we can say we are four years and a half nearer the end of the world, and we can just as clearly see the end of the world as we can see the end of this agitation.  The Kansas settlement did not conclude it.  If Kansas should sink to-day, and leave a great vacant space in the earth’s surface, this vexed question would still be among us.  I say, then, there is no way of putting an end to the slavery agitation amongst us but to put it back upon the basis where our fathers placed it; no way but to keep it out of our new Territories,—­to restrict it forever to the old States where it now exists.  Then the public mind will rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction.  That is one way of putting an end to the slavery agitation.

The other way is for us to surrender and let Judge Douglas and his friends have their way and plant slavery over all the States; cease speaking of it as in any way a wrong; regard slavery as one of the common matters of property, and speak of negroes as we do of our horses and cattle.  But while it drives on in its state of progress as it is now driving, and as it has driven for the last five years, I have ventured the opinion, and I say to-day, that we will have no end to the slavery agitation until it takes one turn or the other.  I do not mean that when it takes a turn toward ultimate extinction it will be in a day, nor in a year, nor in two years.  I do not suppose that in the most peaceful way ultimate extinction would occur in less than a hundred years at least; but that it will occur in the best way for both races, in God’s own good time, I have no doubt.  But, my friends, I have used up more of my time than I intended on this point.

Now, in regard to this matter about Trumbull and myself having made a bargain to sell out the entire Whig and Democratic parties in 1854:  Judge Douglas brings forward no evidence to sustain his charge, except the speech Matheny is said to have made in 1856, in which he told a cock-and-bull story of that sort, upon the same moral principles that Judge Douglas tells it here to-day.  This is the simple truth.  I do not care greatly for the story, but this is the truth of it:  and I have twice told Judge Douglas to his face that from beginning to end there is not one word of truth in it.  I have called upon him for the proof, and he does not at all meet me as Trumbull met him upon that of which we were just talking, by producing the record.  He did n’t bring the record because there was no record for him to bring.