Another thing he tells you, in a speech made at Memphis in Tennessee, shortly after the canvass in Illinois, last year.  He there distinctly told the people that there was a “line drawn by the Almighty across this continent, on the one side of which the soil must always be cultivated by slaves”; that he did not pretend to know exactly where that line was, but that there was such a line.  I want to ask your attention to that proposition again; that there is one portion of this continent where the Almighty has signed the soil shall always be cultivated by slaves; that its being cultivated by slaves at that place is right; that it has the direct sympathy and authority of the Almighty.  Whenever you can get these Northern audiences to adopt the opinion that slavery is right on the other side of the Ohio, whenever you can get them, in pursuance of Douglas’s views, to adopt that sentiment, they will very readily make the other argument, which is perfectly logical, that that which is right on that side of the Ohio cannot be wrong on this, and that if you have that property on that side of the Ohio, under the seal and stamp of the Almighty, when by any means it escapes over here it is wrong to have constitutions and laws “to devil” you about it.  So Douglas is moulding the public opinion of the North, first to say that the thing is right in your State over the Ohio River, and hence to say that that which is right there is not wrong here, and that all laws and constitutions here recognizing it as being wrong are themselves wrong, and ought to be repealed and abrogated.  He will tell you, men of Ohio, that if you choose here to have laws against slavery, it is in conformity to the idea that your climate is not suited to it, that your climate is not suited to slave labor, and therefore you have constitutions and laws against it.

Let us attend to that argument for a little while and see if it be sound.  You do not raise sugar-cane (except the new-fashioned sugar-cane, and you won’t raise that long), but they do raise it in Louisiana.  You don’t raise it in Ohio, because you can’t raise it profitably, because the climate don’t suit it.  They do raise it in Louisiana, because there it is profitable.  Now, Douglas will tell you that is precisely the slavery question:  that they do have slaves there because they are profitable, and you don’t have them here because they are not profitable.  If that is so, then it leads to dealing with the one precisely as with the other.  Is there, then, anything in the constitution or laws of Ohio against raising sugar-cane?  Have you found it necessary to put any such provision in your law?  Surely not!  No man desires to raise sugar-cane in Ohio, but if any man did desire to do so, you would say it was a tyrannical law that forbids his doing so; and whenever you shall agree with Douglas, whenever your minds are brought to adopt his argument, as surely you will have reached the conclusion that although it is not profitable in Ohio, if any man wants it, is wrong to him not to let him have it.