In this matter Judge Douglas is preparing the public mind for you of Kentucky to make perpetual that good thing in your estimation, about which you and I differ.

In this connection, let me ask your attention to another thing.  I believe it is safe to assert that five years ago no living man had expressed the opinion that the negro had no share in the Declaration of Independence.  Let me state that again:  five years ago no living man had expressed the opinion that the negro had no share in the Declaration of Independence.  If there is in this large audience any man who ever knew of that opinion being put upon paper as much as five years ago, I will be obliged to him now or at a subsequent time to show it.

If that be true I wish you then to note the next fact:  that within the space of five years Senator Douglas, in the argument of this question, has got his entire party, so far as I know, without exception, in saying that the negro has no share in the Declaration of Independence.  If there be now in all these United States one Douglas man that does not say this, I have been unable upon any occasion to scare him up.  Now, if none of you said this five years ago, and all of you say it now, that is a matter that you Kentuckians ought to note.  That is a vast change in the Northern public sentiment upon that question.

Of what tendency is that change?  The tendency of that change is to bring the public mind to the conclusion that when men are spoken of, the negro is not meant; that when negroes are spoken of, brutes alone are contemplated.  That change in public sentiment has already degraded the black man in the estimation of Douglas and his followers from the condition of a man of some sort, and assigned him to the condition of a brute.  Now, you Kentuckians ought to give Douglas credit for this.  That is the largest possible stride that can be made in regard to the perpetuation of your thing of slavery.

A voice:  Speak to Ohio men, and not to Kentuckians!

Mr. Lincoln:  I beg permission to speak as I please.

In Kentucky perhaps, in many of the slave States certainly, you are trying to establish the rightfulness of slavery by reference to the Bible.  You are trying to show that slavery existed in the Bible times by divine ordinance.  Now, Douglas is wiser than you, for your own benefit, upon that subject.  Douglas knows that whenever you establish that slavery was—­right by the Bible, it will occur that that slavery was the slavery of the white man, of men without reference to color; and he knows very well that you may entertain that idea in Kentucky as much as you please, but you will never win any Northern support upon it.  He makes a wiser argument for you:  he makes the argument that the slavery of the black man; the slavery of the man who has a skin of a different color from your own, is right.  He thereby brings to your support Northern voters who could not for a moment be brought by your own argument of the Bible right of slavery.  Will you give him credit for that?  Will you not say that in this matter he is more wisely for you than you are for yourselves?