my speeches north and south.  While I am here perhaps I ought to say a word, if I have the time, in regard to the latter portion of the Judge’s speech, which was a sort of declamation in reference to my having said I entertained the belief that this government would not endure half slave and half free.  I have said so, and I did not say it without what seemed to me to be good reasons.  It perhaps would require more time than I have now to set forth these reasons in detail; but let me ask you a few questions.  Have we ever had any peace on this slavery question?  When are we to have peace upon it, if it is kept in the position it now occupies?  How are we ever to have peace upon it?  That is an important question.  To be sure, if we will all stop, and allow Judge Douglas and his friends to march on in their present career until they plant the institution all over the nation, here and wherever else our flag waves, and we acquiesce in it, there will be peace.  But let me ask Judge Douglas how he is going to get the people to do that?  They have been wrangling over this question for at least forty years.  This was the cause of the agitation resulting in the Missouri Compromise; this produced the troubles at the annexation of Texas, in the acquisition of the territory acquired in the Mexican War.  Again, this was the trouble which was quieted by the Compromise of 1850, when it was settled “forever” as both the great political parties declared in their National Conventions.  That “forever” turned out to be just four years, when Judge Douglas himself reopened it.  When is it likely to come to an end?  He introduced the Nebraska Bill in 1854 to put another end to the slavery agitation.  He promised that it would finish it all up immediately, and he has never made a speech since, until he got into a quarrel with the President about the Lecompton Constitution, in which he has not declared that we are just at the end of the slavery agitation.  But in one speech, I think last winter, he did say that he did n’t quite see when the end of the slavery agitation would come.  Now he tells us again that it is all over and the people of Kansas have voted down the Lecompton Constitution.  How is it over?  That was only one of the attempts at putting an end to the slavery agitation—­one of these “final settlements.”  Is Kansas in the Union?  Has she formed a constitution that she is likely to come in under?  Is not the slavery agitation still an open question in that Territory?  Has the voting down of that constitution put an end to all the trouble?  Is that more likely to settle it than every one of these previous attempts to settle the slavery agitation?  Now, at this day in the history of the world we can no more foretell where the end of this slavery agitation will be than we can see the end of the world itself.  The Nebraska-Kansas Bill was introduced four years and a half ago, and if the agitation is ever to come to an end we may say we are four years and a half nearer the end.  So,