to support it in the way in which I understand it.
And as Judge Douglas believes that decision to be
correct, I will remake that argument if I have time
to do so. Let me talk to some gentleman down there
among you who looks me in the face. We will say
you are a member of the Territorial Legislature, and,
like Judge Douglas, you believe that the right to take
and hold slaves there is a constitutional right The
first thing you do is to swear you will support the
Constitution, and all rights guaranteed therein; that
you will, whenever your neighbor needs your legislation
to support his constitutional rights, not withhold
that legislation. If you withhold that necessary
legislation for the support of the Constitution and
constitutional rights, do you not commit perjury?
I ask every sensible man if that is not so? That
is undoubtedly just so, say what you please.
Now, that is precisely what Judge Douglas says, that
this is a constitutional right. Does the Judge
mean to say that the Territorial Legislature in legislating
may, by withholding necessary laws, or by passing
unfriendly laws, nullify that constitutional right?
Does he mean to say that? Does he mean to ignore
the proposition so long and well established in law,
that what you cannot do directly, you cannot do indirectly?
Does he mean that? The truth about the matter
is this: Judge Douglas has sung paeans to his
“Popular Sovereignty” doctrine until his
Supreme Court, co-operating with him, has squatted
his Squatter Sovereignty out. But he will keep
up this species of humbuggery about Squatter Sovereignty.
He has at last invented this sort of do-nothing sovereignty,—that
the people may exclude slavery by a sort of “sovereignty”
that is exercised by doing nothing at all. Is
not that running his Popular Sovereignty down awfully?
Has it not got down as thin as the homeopathic soup
that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that
had starved to death? But at last, when it is
brought to the test of close reasoning, there is not
even that thin decoction of it left. It is a
presumption impossible in the domain of thought.
It is precisely no other than the putting of that
most unphilosophical proposition, that two bodies
can occupy the same space at the same time. The
Dred Scott decision covers the whole ground, and while
it occupies it, there is no room even for the shadow
of a starved pigeon to occupy the same ground.
Judge Douglas, in reply to what I have said about
having upon a previous occasion made the speech at
Ottawa as the one he took an extract from at Charleston,
says it only shows that I practiced the deception twice.
Now, my friends, are any of you obtuse enough to swallow
that? Judge Douglas had said I had made a speech
at Charleston that I would not make up north, and
I turned around and answered him by showing I had made
that same speech up north,—had made it
at Ottawa; made it in his hearing; made it in the
Abolition District,—in Lovejoy’s District,—in
the personal presence of Lovejoy himself,—in
the same atmosphere exactly in which I had made my
Chicago speech, of which he complains so much.