I propose to examine the points in Judge Douglas’s speech in which he attempts to answer that speech of Judge Trumbull’s.  When you come to examine Judge Douglas’s speech, you will find that the first point he makes is: 

“Suppose it were true that there was such a change in the bill, and that I struck it out,—­is that a proof of a plot to force a constitution upon them against their will?”

His striking out such a provision, if there was such a one in the bill, he argues, does not establish the proof that it was stricken out for the purpose of robbing the people of that right.  I would say, in the first place, that that would be a most manifest reason for it.  It is true, as Judge Douglas states, that many Territorial bills have passed without having such a provision in them.  I believe it is true, though I am not certain, that in some instances constitutions framed under such bills have been submitted to a vote of the people with the law silent upon the subject; but it does not appear that they once had their enabling acts framed with an express provision for submitting the constitution to be framed to a vote of the people, then that they were stricken out when Congress did not mean to alter the effect of the law.  That there have been bills which never had the provision in, I do not question; but when was that provision taken out of one that it was in?  More especially does the evidence tend to prove the proposition that Trumbull advanced, when we remember that the provision was stricken out of the bill almost simultaneously with the time that Bigler says there was a conference among certain senators, and in which it was agreed that a bill should be passed leaving that out.  Judge Douglas, in answering Trumbull, omits to attend to the testimony of Bigler, that there was a meeting in which it was agreed they should so frame the bill that there should be no submission of the constitution to a vote of the people.  The Judge does not notice this part of it.  If you take this as one piece of evidence, and then ascertain that simultaneously Judge Douglas struck out a provision that did require it to be submitted, and put the two together, I think it will make a pretty fair show of proof that Judge Douglas did, as Trumbull says, enter into a plot to put in force a constitution for Kansas, without giving the people any opportunity of voting upon it.

But I must hurry on.  The next proposition that Judge Douglas puts is this: 

“But upon examination it turns out that the Toombs bill never did contain a clause requiring the constitution to be submitted.”