Complete Project Gutenberg Abraham Lincoln Writings eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,923 pages of information about Complete Project Gutenberg Abraham Lincoln Writings.

Complete Project Gutenberg Abraham Lincoln Writings eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,923 pages of information about Complete Project Gutenberg Abraham Lincoln Writings.

["He didn’t deny one of them.”]

I would then like to know how it comes about that when each piece of a story is true the whole story turns out false.  I take it these people have some sense; they see plainly that Judge Douglas is playing cuttle-fish, a small species of fish that has no mode of defending itself when pursued except by throwing out a black fluid, which makes the water so dark the enemy cannot see it, and thus it escapes.  Ain’t the Judge playing the cuttle-fish?

Now, I would ask very special attention to the consideration of Judge Douglas’s speech at Jacksonville; and when you shall read his speech of to-day, I ask you to watch closely and see which of these pieces of testimony, every one of which he says is a forgery, he has shown to be such.  Not one of them has he shown to be a forgery.  Then I ask the original question, if each of the pieces of testimony is true, how is it possible that the whole is a falsehood?

In regard to Trumbull’s charge that he [Douglas] inserted a provision into the bill to prevent the constitution being submitted to the people, what was his answer?  He comes here and reads from the Congressional Globe to show that on his motion that provision was struck out of the bill.  Why, Trumbull has not said it was not stricken out, but Trumbull says he [Douglas] put it in; and it is no answer to the charge to say he afterwards took it out.  Both are perhaps true.  It was in regard to that thing precisely that I told him he had dropped the cub.  Trumbull shows you that by his introducing the bill it was his cub.  It is no answer to that assertion to call Trumbull a liar merely because he did not specially say that Douglas struck it out.  Suppose that were the case, does it answer Trumbull?  I assert that you [pointing to an individual] are here to-day, and you undertake to prove me a liar by showing that you were in Mattoon yesterday.  I say that you took your hat off your head, and you prove me a liar by putting it on your head.  That is the whole force of Douglas’s argument.

Now, I want to come back to my original question.  Trumbull says that Judge Douglas had a bill with a provision in it for submitting a constitution to be made to a vote of the people of Kansas.  Does Judge Douglas deny that fact?  Does he deny that the provision which Trumbull reads was put in that bill?  Then Trumbull says he struck it out.  Does he dare to deny that?  He does not, and I have the right to repeat the question,—­Why Judge Douglas took it out?  Bigler has said there was a combination of certain senators, among whom he did not include Judge Douglas, by which it was agreed that the Kansas Bill should have a clause in it not to have the constitution formed under it submitted to a vote of the people.  He did not say that Douglas was among them, but we prove by another source that about the same time Douglas comes into the Senate with that provision stricken out of the bill.  Although Bigler cannot say they were all working in

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