Writings of Abraham Lincoln, the — Volume 4: the Lincoln-Douglas debates eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 134 pages of information about Writings of Abraham Lincoln, the — Volume 4.

Writings of Abraham Lincoln, the — Volume 4: the Lincoln-Douglas debates eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 134 pages of information about Writings of Abraham Lincoln, the — Volume 4.

That is the real issue.  That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent.  It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—­right and wrong—­throughout the world.  They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle.  The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings.  It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself.  It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.”  No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.  I was glad to express my gratitude at Quincy, and I re-express it here, to Judge Douglas,—­that he looks to no end of the institution of slavery.  That will help the people to see where the struggle really is.  It will hereafter place with us all men who really do wish the wrong may have an end.  And whenever we can get rid of the fog which obscures the real question, when we can get Judge Douglas and his friends to avow a policy looking to its perpetuation,—­we can get out from among that class of men and bring them to the side of those who treat it as a wrong.  Then there will soon be an end of it, and that end will be its “ultimate extinction.”  Whenever the issue can be distinctly made, and all extraneous matter thrown out so that men can fairly see the real difference between the parties, this controversy will soon be settled, and it will be done peaceably too.  There will be no war, no violence.  It will be placed again where the wisest and best men of the world placed it.  Brooks of South Carolina once declared that when this Constitution was framed its framers did not look to the institution existing until this day.  When he said this, I think he stated a fact that is fully borne out by the history of the times.  But he also said they were better and wiser men than the men of these days, yet the men of these days had experience which they had not, and by the invention of the cotton-gin it became a necessity in this country that slavery should be perpetual.  I now say that, willingly or unwillingly—­purposely or without purpose, Judge Douglas has been the most prominent instrument in changing the position of the institution of slavery,—­which the fathers of the government expected to come to an end ere this, and putting it upon Brooks’s cotton-gin basis; placing it where he openly confesses he has no desire there shall ever be an end of it.

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Writings of Abraham Lincoln, the — Volume 4: the Lincoln-Douglas debates from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.