There is another thing to which I wish to ask attention for a little while on this occasion.  What has always been the evidence brought forward to prove that the Republican party is a sectional party?  The main one was that in the Southern portion of the Union the people did not let the Republicans proclaim their doctrines amongst them.  That has been the main evidence brought forward,—­that they had no supporters, or substantially none, in the Slave States.  The South have not taken hold of our principles as we announce them; nor does Judge Douglas now grapple with those principles.  We have a Republican State Platform, laid down in Springfield in June last stating our position all the way through the questions before the country.  We are now far advanced in this canvass.  Judge Douglas and I have made perhaps forty speeches apiece, and we have now for the fifth time met face to face in debate, and up to this day I have not found either Judge Douglas or any friend of his taking hold of the Republican platform, or laying his finger upon anything in it that is wrong.  I ask you all to recollect that.  Judge Douglas turns away from the platform of principles to the fact that he can find people somewhere who will not allow us to announce those principles.  If he had great confidence that our principles were wrong, he would take hold of them and demonstrate them to be wrong.  But he does not do so.  The only evidence he has of their being wrong is in the fact that there are people who won’t allow us to preach them.  I ask again, is that the way to test the soundness of a doctrine?

I ask his attention also to the fact that by the rule of nationality he is himself fast becoming sectional.  I ask his attention to the fact that his speeches would not go as current now south of the Ohio River as they have formerly gone there I ask his attention to the fact that he felicitates himself to-day that all the Democrats of the free States are agreeing with him, while he omits to tell us that the Democrats of any slave State agree with him.  If he has not thought of this, I commend to his consideration the evidence in his own declaration, on this day, of his becoming sectional too.  I see it rapidly approaching.  Whatever may be the result of this ephemeral contest between Judge Douglas and myself, I see the day rapidly approaching when his pill of sectionalism, which he has been thrusting down the throats of Republicans for years past, will be crowded down his own throat.

Now, in regard to what Judge Douglas said (in the beginning of his speech) about the Compromise of 1850 containing the principles of the Nebraska Bill, although I have often presented my views upon that subject, yet as I have not done so in this canvass, I will, if you please, detain you a little with them.  I have always maintained, so far as I was able, that there was nothing of the principle of the Nebraska Bill in the Compromise of 1850 at all,—­nothing whatever.  Where can you find the principle of